Colin Hogg: BBC drama The Missing is terrible in the very best way

James Nesbitt stars in The Missing, on TV One, and he's awfully good.

The Missing goes straight for the jugular with its tale of grief.

Entertainment is a funny business, especially when it's not that funny at all. Take, for instance, The Missing, a new British television drama series that launched on TV One on Sunday night in both terrific and dreadful style.

Terrific because it's a class act, another compelling TV series that looks and feels more like a rather long movie, as the best of international TV dramas often do these days.

And dreadful because The Missing dives, without hesitation, straight for the darkest parts of our deepest fears where it proceeds to squeeze us tight and not let go. And I've only seen episode one so far.

There are seven more to screen and it's going to be rough going for us softies, who might be better off avoiding unwatchably watchable TV like this. Oh well, too late.

The series stars the highly adaptable James Nesbitt " he's also a dwarf in The Hobbit " as a dad gone mad after the sudden disappearance of his son on a holiday in France.

Nesbitt seems utterly real in the role, as does Frances O'Connor, playing his wife, as the story begins to unfold with seamless unease. It's not a new tale, told in fiction or fact, but it's one, as I said, that grips you, albeit uncomfortably.

To make Sunday evenings even more uneasy, it's not unlike Broadchurch, which is currently unfolding its latest dark tale on TV One, programmed, thoughtfully, right before it.

The Missing makes its mark immediately by playing clever with time, jumping back and forth through the years, emphasising the anguish and the damage done by the awful mystery still unsolved.

Eight years earlier, the happy couple were on holiday in France, having an almost cliched idyllic time with their cute and loveable 5-year-old son when, in a crowded bar with his dad in a brief moment of oversight, the boy disappears. Gone, just like that.

And now, in the present day, the boy is still unfound, the family is no more, the wife remarried with a stepson (the age her own son would be) and her ex-husband (Nesbitt) haunts the village where his boy disappeared, grey-haired, still crazy with grief, searching for answers and unsettling the surly mono-lingual locals with his bad behaviour.

Doesn't sound like a lot of fun, does it? It's not, but it does, on the strength of the opening episode, seem to be a fantastic piece of drama and I'll be hanging in with it, grievous as the tale looks very likely to be.

To be honest, I'll cope better by letting go of Broadchurch, which I've been finding heavy going this time and just too gloomy for its - or my - own good in its second series.

I can take only so much dramatised grief at any one time, so something had to give and The Missing wins. Nesbitt is a large part of it. Coincidentally, I'd seen him at the movies only days earlier playing that happy dwarf in The Hobbit, so he had to be good to convince me as the bitter, desperate man he takes on in this series.

And he's good alright, in a terrible sort of way.

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