Kaley Cuoco Gonna Cuoco

We’ve been down this aisle before, but it is worth repeating in light of Vanished: Kaley Cuoco’s post-Big Bang Theory career has found its lane, for better or worse. The actress clearly loves making mysteries and spy thrillers now — The Flight Attendant, Role Play, Based on a True Story — but unfortunately, she has not yet been able to recapture the magic of the first season of HBO Max’s The Flight Attendant.

Vanished is unlikely to break that streak, although plotwise it is a spiritual cousin to the HBO Max series, in which Cuoco woke up next to a dead body and spent the rest of the season trying to solve the mystery and clear her name. In Vanished, archaeologist Alice Monroe (Cuoco) takes a train from London to Arles for a French vacation, only for her boyfriend, Tom (Sam Claflin), to disappear somewhere along the way. Where did he go, and what is he involved with?

Vanished, created by David Hilton and Preston Thompson, is another mystery that opens in media res: A man wearing a motorcycle helmet shows up in Alice’s hotel room and ultimately pursues her through the streets of France, wielding a knife. Cut to one week earlier, where Alice is having dinner with Tom, her boyfriend of four years, and explaining that she has landed a teaching position at Princeton and wants him to move to New Jersey with her.

Tom seems initially reluctant but ultimately agrees. After a phone call, he steps out of their hotel room and later tells Alice that he has booked them into a fancy hotel in Arles. When he later disappears on the train, Alice begins investigating with Hélène (Karin Viard), who claims to be an investigative journalist, and a reluctant detective, Inspector Dax (Simon Abkarian).

Meanwhile, the series flashes back to Alice and Tom’s chance meeting in Syria, where he supposedly provides humanitarian relief in the form of vaccines. His car just happens to break down as Alice is driving by. She helps him deliver vaccines and watches him play hero. It obviously feels like a setup to everyone but Alice, and presumably that past will feed into the present.

That is essentially the show. It is not terrible, just mostly hollow. Kaley Cuoco seems to have misplaced the comic instincts that make her so likable. There is little of that here, as her character in Vanished is largely a charmless bore stuck in a relationship with an uninteresting Tom Claflin character. It feels like the kind of series that is so reverent toward its source material that it becomes lifeless, except there is no source material on which Vanished is based.

The good news is that it is only four episodes. It is also not entirely worthless. Cuoco is still Cuoco, and it is hard to completely bury her bumbling charisma. The same cannot be said for Claflin, who is essentially a fridged character. No one in the supporting cast brings much spark, either, so the series is forced to coast on Cuoco’s effortless charm, only here it is so understated that it barely registers. Maybe it improves, but there is nothing in the pilot to suggest that it will be much more than background viewing.

The first episode of’Vanished’ began streaming on MGM+ this week. New episodes will release on Sundays.