Very very predictable, including the post credit scene !!!

Truly Dreadful Film

Don't listen to the negative reviews

This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

And so yet another story about a missing child and the disappearance's affect on parents, friends and communities. Set in London and with a varied cast of characters, to say the least, this was gritty and at times hard-to-watch drama. Particularly as it drew to its anti-climactic finish, scenes where a teenage boy uses information about the missing child to force the girl's mother into having sex with him and an excruciatingly disturbing auction amongst low-life deviants to buy a little girl might have had some viewers reaching for the off button.For me, it was all just a little too full on. The main character played by series writer Lennie James answers to the unlikely name of Nellie and runs about everywhere in a bright yellow bubble jacket. On the face of it a likeable rogue, look deeper and you see a guy casually flitting from woman to woman, mooching favours from all and sundry, who's abandoned his daughter years ago when an out of the blue message from her on his mobile phone before she's abducted sets up the events which follow.About that varied mix of characters, prominent amongst Nellie's friends is a guy who goes by the name of Melon previously convicted of corrupting an underage girl, only she's stood by him although not without lingering doubts as to his continuing proclivities no doubt as she moves past her own teenage years, a transvestite with a heart of gold, a group of young jeering teenagers who may know more about matters than at first seems, all of Nellie's ex and current girlfriends, including the one who mothered Jodi many years ago and who he's never quite got over and her slightly shady new husband so willing to try anything to erase her memories of Nellie he'll go to loan sharks to get reward money for news on the girl's disappearance.As usual when these shows play out over 6 episodes, there are several sub-plots, red herrings and false climaxes en route, although I can't deny the last episode was gripping if tough to watch. The acting was as you'd expect given the subject matter, deadly serious and mostly overdone by all. I found the direction unnecessarily quirky too with surreally strange background scenes inserted just for their weirdness it seemed to me. I also found the dialogue unrealistic in too many scenes for what purportedly was a near-too-real-life drama.At the end of it all and after watching a slew of similarly themed programmes of late, I was quite drained and glad it was over.Any happy-go-lucky shows out there just for a change?

This made no sense pretty much throughout. Totally unrealistic. Complete waste of 6 hours.

SPOILER: I did enjoy Lennie James' acting. He could have hogged the screen a bit less, though. I also enjoyed Jones' and Graham's work, too. But this looks too much like a vanity project. The writing is wobbly, and the ending is just deplorable. The term cop-out was invented to describe endings such as this one.

Really slow starter but stuck with it because im always a sucker for a high IMDb rating! What a mistake! Found myself unable to care about pretty much any of the characters. Whatever a drama is supposed to elicit in terms of that feeling you get where you give a damn.... this did not deliver. Suranne Jones portrayal of distraught mother of abducted child was woeful. Her Irish husband and his son... what the hell was that about? The ingredients were all there to deliver something great...I just think they got the recipe wrong.