Without a Trace

It has not taken long for Without a Trace to emerge from the shadows of CSI and become a ratings force in its own right. Jerry Bruckheimer produced both series, and both feature the-face-is-familiar character actors with extensive and diverse resumes who have been catapulted to primetime stardom. Jack Malone, head of a crack FBI missing persons unit, is the Australian-born Anthony LaPaglia's breakout role after years of portraying enough Italian mobsters and criminals to populate a season of The Sopranos. LaPaglia was a surprise Golden Globe Award-winner for this inaugural season. Without a Trace is instantly arresting. "The clock is ticking" in each episode, as Malone and company race against time to find a missing person. "After 48 hours," Malone explains to the rookie member of the team in the series pilot, "they're gone." To solve each baffling case, Malone and fellow agents Samantha Spade (Poppy Montgomery), Vivian Johnson (Marianne Jean-Baptiste of Secrets and Lies), Danny Taylor (Enrique Murciano), and new guy Martin Fitzgerald (Eric Close), must work from the inside out. "Once we find out who she is," Malone says of one victim, "odds are we'll find out where she is."
Among the inaugural season's most wrenching episodes are "Between the Cracks" and "Hang On to Me," both featuring Charles Dutton in his Emmy Award-winning performance as a father whose son has been missing for five years. The powerful season finale, "Fallout," presented in this four-disc set in a "creator's cut," concerns a man who lost his wife in the 9/11 attacks. The riveting episodes mostly stand alone, but some cases do return to haunt Malone, as witness "In Extremis," a case that ends tragically and leads to an internal investigation that threatens to subvert the close-knit unit in the episode. "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?" Sharp writing, authentic procedurals, taut direction, and effective use of music make Without a Trace a series worth finding on DVD.

"You can't save everyone, Jack," a child molester taunts FBI Agent Jack Malone before hurling himself out a window. But the tireless efforts of Malone (Anthony LaPaglia in his Golden Globe-winning role) and the members of the elite Missing Persons Squad to do just that are what make Without a Trace so compelling. Each episode is a race against time to find a person who has mysteriously vanished (their slow fade from the screen has lost none of its unsettling power). In some of this sophomore season's most gripping cases, people and events are not what they seem. In "Confidence," the task force discovers that a missing wealthy socialite has a seriously shady past and keeps "bad company." The past haunts the present in "Risen," in which Vivian (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) gets a new lead on a four-year-old case (Kirstie Alley is excellent as the missing girl's distraught mother), and in "Copycat," a sociopath with a grudge against Jack (see "Are You Now or Have You Ever Been" from the first season) is involved in a disappearance with disturbing similarities to a 12-year-old case.
The procedural aspect of Without a Trace is fascinating as Jack and company employ advanced profiling techniques in their investigations. Over the course of the season, episodes also deftly flesh out the characters. Samantha (Poppy Montgomery) struggles with the psychological repercussions of being shot in the season 1 cliffhanger. Taylor (Enrique Murciano) is revealed to have a brother who is in jail. Samantha, who had an affair with Jack, is drawn to Martin (Eric Close). Jack learns that his father (Martin Landau in an Emmy Award-winning performance) has Alzheimer's. He also weighs a move to Chicago to save his rocky marriage. Fulfilling the promise of the auspicious first season, Without a Trace has established itself as among the best-written and -acted (not for nothing did the series earn a Best Casting for TV award from the Casting Society of America) hours on television. And without commercials to break the tension, it's an even more intense experience on DVD.

Executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer's award-winning television series WITHOUT A TRACE follows the FBI's Missing Persons Unit as they investigate individual disappearances in New York City. Led by senior agent Jack Malone (Anthony LaPaglia), the special task force utilises psychological profiling to reconstruct a timeline of the missing person's last day and determine the cause as either kidnapping, murder, suicide, or runaway. This release contains every episode from the third series.

Executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer's award-winning television series WITHOUT A TRACE follows the FBI's Missing Persons Unit as they investigate individual disappearances in New York City. Led by senior agent Jack Malone (Anthony LaPaglia), the special task force utilises psychological profiling to reconstruct a timeline of the missing person's last day and determine the cause as either kidnapping, murder, suicide, or runaway. This release contains every episode from the fourth series.

The sole responsibility of the special New York-based FBI task force known as the Missing Persons Squad is to find missing persons by applying advanced psychological profiling techniques to peel back the layers of the victims' lives and trace their whereabouts in an effort to discover whether they've been abducted, are missing by choice, were murdered, have committed suicide or are simply accident victims. The team members construct a "Day of Disappearance" timeline detailing the 24 hours prior to the disappearance, and they dig into every facet of the victim's life, following a simple rule: learn who the victim is in order to learn where the victim is. Despite their best efforts, the team members are only human, and sometimes their mistakes come back to haunt them. Things don't always go by the book or work out as everyone hopes. As the agents work on varied and complicated cases, details about their personal lives unfold.
Synopsis
Executive producer Jerry Bruckheimer's award-winning television series WITHOUT A TRACE follows the FBI's Missing Persons Unit as they investigate individual disappearances in New York City. Led by senior agent Jack Malone (Anthony LaPaglia), the special task force utilises psychological profiling to reconstruct a timeline of the missing person's last day and determine the cause as either kidnapping, murder, suicide, or runaway. This release contains every episode from the fifth series.