Chilling dig to uncover the truth
It’s dark, sometimes disturbing and won’t be to everyone’s taste, but this drama series is an effective little chiller, perfect for long winter nights, finds James Croot.
It was the horrifying mystery that captured the world’s imagination for four weeks. In early February 2004, 326 people simply vanished without a trace from a small Tennessee town. But as it became just another tragedy among countless other tragedies, virtually everyone not directly affected by the incident forgot about it.
Not Lia Haddock (Jessica Biel). Fifteen years on, the American Public Radio journalist is determined to have one more crack at trying to solve how her uncle and the others disappeared off the face of the Earth.
Welcome to Limetown (now streaming on Neon), Zack Akers and Skip Bronkie’s slick, taut and engrossing 10-part television adaptation of their hit 2015 podcast.
Although there are echoes of big-budget shows like Lost, Manifest and Under the Dome, Limetown’s strengths come from its simplicity and lowkey approach.
This is not a multiplecharacter, countless-storyline, fractured narrative, but rather it follows Haddock’s dogged determination to uncover the truth. Brought to life by a brilliantly understated and engagingly flawed Biel (when we first hear about her project, Haddock is already a week past her deadline and struggling to say anything new, much to the exasperation of her boss), we follow her process as she interviews ‘‘the closest person the world has to an eyewitness’’, the one journalist invited to the facility’s open day.
Granted access to the ghost town (left standing ‘‘only to give an illusion of hope’’, as she cynically notes), Haddock sees first-hand some of the disturbing things left behind. Pictures with eyes scratched out, a single skeleton of someone seemingly burnt at the stake.
They join the panicked 911 call on the day and the strange private security firm that prevented emergency services accessing Limetown for 72 hours before simply dispersing without explanation, as things not easily explained away.
It all just serves to deepen the mystery and most certainly encourages that ‘‘just-one-moreepisode’’ feeling (especially since they came in easilyconsumed half-hour chunks). Of course, Akers and Bronkie have already whetted the audience’s appetite in the opening few minutes with a tense scene set eight days into the future, which has Haddock looking decidedly fraught.
Biel is backed up by the always reliable Stanley Tucci, as her Uncle Emile, as well as former Oscar-winner Marlee Matlin.
It’s dark, sometimes disturbing and won’t be to everyone’s taste, but Limetown is an effective little chiller, perfect for filling a couple of long winter nights.
Limetown is now available to stream on Neon.