Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Alert: Missing Persons Unit’ On Fox, Where Former Spouses Look For Missing Persons In Philadelphia

One of the aspects about the network model of show development that people might not realize is that a show may change a lot between the pilot that gets sold to a network and the pilot that hits the air. There are recasts, changes in locale, changes in tone, characters that disappear, and more. As much as producers think that some reshoots and clever editing can smooth over those changes, sometimes the seams still show. That’s certainly the case for a new procedural on Fox. But does that detract from the show in general?

ALERT: MISSING PERSONS UNIT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: “ISIL COMPOUND. KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN.” Jason Grant (Scott Caan), a private contractor working with the military, leans over a young Afghani girl who is sitting on top of a weight-controlled explosive device.

The Gist: Jason defuses that bomb but it goes off right as he escapes the compound with the girl, the daughter of a major terrorist target. But during the celebration — he’s scheduled to go home the next day — he gets a call from his wife Nikki Batista (Dania Ramirez), a Philadelphia cop, that their son Keith has gone missing, that he was “taken.”

Six years later, Keith still hasn’t been found and is presumed dead. Jason and Nikki’s marriage didn’t survive the tragedy, though the two are on friendly terms and co-parent their daughter Sydney (Fivel Stewart). They’re also with other people; Jason’s SO is trying to get pregnant and Nikki, now the commander of the Philly PD’s Missing Persons Unit, is dating Mike (Ryan Broussard), the detective in the MPU that investigated Kevin’s case. He’s now her second-in-command.

The reason why she joined the MPU is because, as she tells the parents of a missing girls, “We get our babies back.” She wants to be able to help others like the unit helped her, even if the results weren’t what she wanted. During that missing girl’s case, one of the suspected kidnappers is captured, and Jason, a former Philly cop, busts into an interrogation led by Kemi (Adeola Role), one of the other detectives, and recognizes the ring he’s wearing from his days in Afghanistan. It turns out that the father’s job isn’t what it seems, and what he really does involved the CIA and a bombing overseas that killed many civilians.

In the meantime, Jason gets a proof-of-life picture of a now-teenage Keith (Graham Verchere), which Kemi uses her investigation skills to pinpoint to a hotel in Las Vegas. Nikki is reserving hope, but Jason is fully on board, despite the reservations of C (Petey Gibson), the tech specialist who created an aging algorithm for missing children, after he saw the photo.

Even more is going on: Mike proposes to Nikki right in the middle of the squad room, Nikki and Jason go to Vegas on a lead about Keith, Jason joins the MPU on Mike’s suggestion, and suddenly Keith shows up in Philly. But is it really Keith?

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Alert: Missing Persons Unit (previously known as simply Alert) has a strong procedural vibe, along the lines of Fox’s 9-1-1 franchise and the FBI and NCIS franchises.

Our Take: Alert starts off promising — and for a show like this, “promising” means “not hideously stupid” — and then goes downhill quickly in the episode’s second half. It feels like showrunner/co-creator John Eisendrath (The Blacklist) just decided to throw lots of crazy into his pilot script after keeping it under control for the first 20 minutes (the show’s other creator is, believe it or not, Jamie Foxx). It makes for a show that’s even more frustrating than the standard brain-dead network procedural, because you know that it can be so much better than it is.

The good part is the banter between Caan and Ramirez. It’s refreshing to see a divorced couple that are still amicable, one that still even loves each other, but extreme circumstances brought their marriage down. They’re family, and they act that way. In scenes where the two of them banter about their respective new relationships, linking it back to their history, are good-natured and not with angry recriminations. And they give some character depth, as we find out that Jason has no desire to have more kids based on the trauma over losing Keith.

We also liked supporting characters like Kemi and C, who have quirks and show just enough of their personality to be interesting to watch in the first season. The overarching story about Keith has potential, though Eisendrath seems to telegraph pretty quickly that Keith isn’t really who he says he is, before it’s confirmed for us later on. It blunts the impact of the final scene, where we find out how this version of Keith knows things only the real Keith would know.

But the second half of the episode shows all of the cheese that infects many procedurals like this. Jason and Nikki seem to molecularly transport between Philly and Las Vegas and back again, even though a flight between the two cities is four-plus hours long, not including lines at the airport. This feels like a remnant of an old version of the pilot, where the MPU was in Los Angeles and not the east coast, as the two of them are shown going back and forth during the case they’re currently working on and not skipping a beat, despite eight or ten hours having elapsed.

Also, there seems to be a whole lot of chumminess in the MPU. “I cleared it with HR first”, a line Mike says before proposing to Nikki, doesn’t explain how a romance between the two even is allowed to exist, given that Nikki is supposedly his boss. How did Nikki even rocket from beat cop to captain of a unit, past more veteran detectives, in six short years, by the way? And just when was Jason a cop? Before Afghanistan or after? How does Keith get to go directly home after being found without getting checked out, physically and mentally?

Hopefully, all of this jumbled storytelling is just the result of a Frankensteined pilot, and as we get into the episodes and the various cases of the week, things will smooth out. We also hope that this whole Jason-Nikki-Mike thing, where Mike thinks things between Nikki and Jason are re-sparked by Keith’s return, gets pushed to the side. There’s more than enough going on with the cases of the week and the Keith situation; we don’t need a love triangle in there too.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: As Keith tears up the journal he memorized of the real Keith’s life, Nikki bids him goodnight through the door and they exchange “love yous”.

Sleeper Star: Role is good as Kemi, who isn’t afraid to bring prayer into the process during the investigation, but also seems to be a miracle worker when it comes to pinpointing pictures from their backgrounds.

Most Pilot-y Line: C calls Jason “pre-disabled,” and we have no idea what that means. We think it’s a dig, but who knows?

Our Call: SKIP IT. While there’s a lot to like about Alert: Missing Persons Unit, the generic cases of the week plus the logic leaps of some of the show’s storytelling lead us to believe that the show is going to contain more bad than good.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.