# The Disappearance (2017)

> After ten-year-old Anthony Sullivan vanishes on his birthday, his family's buried secrets surface and tear them apart.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/63401

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 6
- Episode runtime: 43 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: drama, mystery
- Created by: Geneviève Simard, Normand Daneau
- Network: CTV
- Cast: Aden Young, Peter Coyote, Camille Sullivan, Joanne Kelly, Micheline Lanctôt, Michael Riendeau, Laurence Leboeuf, Henry Kwok
- TMDB rating: 7.1/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6643540/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: layered
- Violence: none
- Tone: melancholic, tense, contemplative, intimate

## Synopsis

The Disappearance (2017) is a Canadian mystery drama miniseries created by Geneviève Simard and Normand Daneau for CTV. Across six 43-minute episodes, the story centres on the Sullivan family after ten-year-old Anthony vanishes on his tenth birthday. Luke Sullivan (Aden Young) and Helen Murphy Sullivan (Camille Sullivan) struggle with grief while the patriarch Henry Sullivan (Peter Coyote) and Catherine Sullivan (Joanne Kelly) are drawn into the investigation. Michael Riendeau plays Anthony in the earlier timeline, and Micheline Lanctôt appears as Susan Bowden. The engine of the show is the slow erosion of a family's trust as the police fail to find the boy and the years pass, dragging long-buried secrets into the open. Each episode peels back another layer of the past, with the timeline moving between the present search and earlier decades. The tone is melancholic and tense, more contemplative than thriller-driven, with a quiet, intimate Quebec-set atmosphere. Fans of Big Little Lies, The Killing and Broadchurch will find resonance in its focus on domestic fracture and the cost of an unanswered question. Set in contemporary Quebec with flashbacks into the 1970s, it is a single season limited run that rewards patient viewing.

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- [Departure (2019)](https://ember.film/tv/77549)
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