*moderate Spoilers*

It is quite rare to see an international show break through at the Emmy Awards. Every once in a while, something becomes such a phenomenon that American productions have to step aside and make room for something that deserves to be recognized. Obviously, Squid Game is a great example, but arguably so is Downton Abbey. Even when we’re talking about English-language international productions, a lot of BBC shows and Australian productions that cross over end up getting snubbed. Heated Rivalry was a pop culture phenomenon this past awards season, and yet somehow failed to crack the Emmy race. So, let me be the first to say, for your consideration in all categories, Apple TV presents Last Seen. No mystery here. I wanted to get that out there immediately because I genuinely believe Last Seen is one of the best shows I’ve seen in 2026. This is a series that kept getting better and better, richer and deeper, exploring its characters while pushing and pulling at what you would expect from a show like this, twisting and manipulating those expectations into something different and fresh. Perhaps it’s the Australian perspective, or perhaps the creative team behind the series simply decided that the best way to tackle a premise we’ve seen before was to subvert expectations. Either way, the result is remarkable.

Before we go any further, I do want to offer a moderate spoiler warning. I have absolutely no intention of telling you how this series ends, but there is a revelation that I want to discuss because it is such an important component of why I believe Last Seen is brilliant. There’s really no way around it. The basic premise follows Ian Ridley (Patrick Brammall), a former Australian police officer who now works as an emergency dispatcher. Essentially, he’s answering Australia’s equivalent of 911 calls. We learn that his young daughter, Maggie, was kidnapped from their home while her older brother was supposed to be watching her. Eleven years later, what was once a happy household has been fractured by blame, regret, sadness, and obsession. Ian has divorced his wife, Debbie (Jessica Wren), who has since remarried and is pregnant, while his son, Dean (Tobias Muhafidin), has grown up and become borderline estranged from his father. Ian has never accepted that his daughter is dead, and his inability to move forward has essentially consumed his entire existence. Meanwhile, we’re following another family, Henry (Brendan Cowell) and Jenna Reid (Maxine Peake), a survivalist couple living on an isolated property, away from society, behind a heavily guarded entrance. Henry is incredibly distrustful of the outside world, passing his conspiracy theories and fundamentalist beliefs onto his family, including his teenage daughter, Sarah (Chloe Jean Lourdes), who has been homeschooled her entire life and has had very little contact with anyone outside her immediate family.

Sarah is a bright young teenager who has essentially grown up knowing only her mother and father, with occasional visits from her uncle. She’s been sheltered from practically everything, including technology, music, and the kinds of social interactions most teenagers take for granted. Things begin to change when a new neighbor moves onto an adjacent property, allowing Sarah to develop a friendship with a teenage boy. He introduces her to music through a portable device, opening up an entirely new world of possibilities. It’s also through this connection to the outside world that Sarah begins learning about a vigil being held for a young girl who disappeared years earlier. Human remains have recently been discovered, and the community believes they might belong to the missing child. Now, here’s where we enter moderate spoiler territory. Last Seen heavily implies that Sarah is, in fact, Maggie, the daughter who was kidnapped from Ian’s home all those years ago. And in order to explain why this series works as brilliantly as it does, I’m going to confirm that she is. Sarah is Maggie. She’s been living relatively close to her biological family this entire time, completely isolated from them, raised by two people who took her and created an entirely different life for her. She has fleeting memories of her early childhood, and even hearing the name Maggie seems to awaken something buried deep within her.

Obviously, the series eventually tackles Ian discovering that his daughter is still alive and his relentless pursuit to find her and bring her home. This gives the story momentum that it otherwise might not have if we were simply watching Sarah living on a farm with the people she believes are her parents. But where Last Seen becomes incredibly interesting is in the fact that Henry and Jenna kind of are her parents. The series leans into something resembling the maximum emotional complexity of Stockholm syndrome, because Sarah is ultimately a child who has suffered as a result of decisions made by adults. She didn’t choose any of this. She didn’t choose to be kidnapped, and she certainly didn’t choose the life that followed. But the only world she really remembers is the one Henry and Jenna created for her. Maggie wasn’t kidnapped and sold into some human trafficking operation. She wasn’t subjected to years of sexual exploitation or forced into some horrific existence where she was treated as property. Instead, she was taken and raised by two people who desperately needed a child in their lives, for reasons the series eventually explains in a revelation I found genuinely heartbreaking. And in doing so, Last Seen dares to ask its audience to have empathy for the kidnappers. Not to excuse what they did, because there is absolutely no justification for stealing someone’s child, but to understand them as human beings rather than simply reducing them to monsters.

Ultimately, Last Seen lives and dies on Sarah, and newcomer Chloe Jean Lourdes delivers an extraordinary performance as a young woman trapped between two completely different identities. As Sarah begins discovering who she really is, she starts losing her grip on the world she thought she understood. She knows that kidnapping someone is wrong. She understands that Henry and Jenna committed a terrible crime. But she also can’t simply erase the last eleven years of her life and pretend they never happened. She can’t pretend she wasn’t happy, that she wasn’t loved, or that she didn’t have a childhood filled with experiences that mattered to her. She had food, clothing, shelter, and parents who cared for her. She pursued interests like art and eventually discovered music. Of course, there are plenty of things she didn’t have, things she might have wanted if she’d known they existed, like friends, a traditional school experience, sports, extracurricular activities, and the freedom to discover the world on her own terms. But the reality is that she grew up with two people who loved her, and she loved them back. That’s not something you can simply turn off because someone tells you that your entire childhood was built on a lie.

This is where the series becomes so much more complicated than your standard missing-child thriller. Sarah has incredibly mixed feelings about Ian suddenly going into can’t stop, won’t stop mode to find her and bring her home. It’s not necessarily that she becomes antagonistic or transforms into the villain of her own story, becoming her father’s worst nightmare. It’s far more complicated than that, which is part of the beauty of Last Seen. Sarah is capable of recognizing that she is Maggie, but she’s also Sarah. She understands that what Henry did was wrong, and she understands that Ian has every right to feel the way he does and fight to get his daughter back. But she’s also a teenager trying to reconcile two completely different definitions of family. What makes someone a mother or father? Is it biology? Is it the act of raising a child? Is it love? Can someone do something unforgivably terrible and still be capable of genuinely loving the person they hurt? These are not easy questions, and Last Seen doesn’t insult its audience by pretending there are simple answers. I found the finale simultaneously surprising and heartbreaking, particularly because of the things Sarah is forced to confront and say to the people she cares about. And those people include both sets of parents, the ones who kidnapped her and the ones who spent more than a decade searching for her.

There’s so much more to this story than what I’m telling you, but I want you to get off your ass and put Last Seen on your watch list. The best way I can convince you that this isn’t just another piece of disposable streaming nonsense is to explain that the series takes a premise we’ve seen countless times before and deliberately makes different choices. It develops its characters in unexpected ways, fleshing out their backstories until they become more complicated, complex, and empathetic than you initially imagined. We get to see how Henry and Jenna met and fell in love. We learn why Henry became this fundamentalist survivalist, and how his own upbringing shaped his distrust of society. We begin to understand not just why he kidnapped Sarah, but the entire belief system that allowed him to rationalize what he did. Brendan Cowell is absolutely phenomenal in this role, finding the humanity in someone whose actions should make him completely irredeemable. Maxine Peake is equally compelling as Jenna, a woman whose relationship with Henry and Sarah is informed by grief, desperation, and a deeply complicated understanding of motherhood. These aren’t cartoon villains twirling their mustaches while plotting their next crime. They’re fully realized human beings who have done something terrible, and the series is courageous enough to explore that contradiction.

On the other side of the equation, Patrick Brammall gives a remarkable performance as Ian, a father whose entire identity has been consumed by the disappearance of his daughter. We see how society treats him, how the police have become exhausted by his presence, and how his inability to let go has transformed him into someone who constantly interjects himself into investigations where he has no legal authority. He’s a former police officer who understands how investigations work, but he’s also a grieving father who can’t separate his personal desperation from the responsibilities of law enforcement. The police aren’t necessarily wrong to be frustrated with him, but Ian isn’t wrong to believe that his daughter might still be alive. Both things can be true. Brammall captures the emotional exhaustion of a man who has spent eleven years refusing to surrender hope, even as that hope has destroyed practically everything else in his life. And when the possibility of finding Maggie finally becomes real, there’s something simultaneously inspiring and terrifying about how far he’s willing to go. The series doesn’t automatically reward him for being the biological father, nor does it suggest that his suffering gives him ownership over the person his daughter has become. That distinction is incredibly important.

What would you do for your family? That is the overarching question driving Last Seen, and it’s a question that applies equally to Ian, Henry, Jenna, and Sarah. Every one of these characters makes decisions based on their understanding of what family means, and those decisions aren’t always easy to categorize. There are moments when the right and wrong are abundantly clear, but the emotional consequences exist in a morally gray area that the series explores with remarkable intelligence. You can see the black and white on either side, but you can also understand how well-defined the gray area is. And that is what makes this story so compelling. It doesn’t ask you to forgive Henry for kidnapping a child. It asks you to recognize that Sarah’s love for him is real, regardless of how she came to be his daughter. It doesn’t ask you to condemn Ian for refusing to give up. It asks you to recognize that his determination to reclaim his daughter might not necessarily align with what she wants or needs. Even the terrific audio description recognizes this complicated relationship with identity. Once Sarah is confirmed to be Maggie, the audio description begins referring to her as Maggie, even while the character herself, and some of the people around her, continue calling her Sarah. It’s a fascinating little detail that reinforces the central conflict of the series, because the question isn’t simply where Maggie has been. It’s who Maggie has become.

I would love to see Last Seen become a serious contender during the next Emmy season. Brendan Cowell absolutely deserves consideration for Outstanding Lead Actor in a Limited Series, and Chloe Jean Lourdes deserves the same consideration for Outstanding Lead Actress. For someone making her screen debut, Lourdes demonstrates an extraordinary ability to communicate the emotional contradictions of a character who is essentially being asked to choose between two different lives. Cowell, meanwhile, delivers one of those performances that becomes increasingly impressive as the series reveals more about his character. Patrick Brammall and Maxine Peake shouldn’t be overlooked either, and frankly, the entire production deserves recognition. Adapted by Kris Mrksa from Ryan David Jahn’s novel The Dispatcher and directed by Christian Schwochow, this six-episode limited series is an exceptional achievement in character-driven storytelling. Unfortunately, I also recognize that there will be plenty of high-profile American limited series competing for those nominations, and international productions often struggle to break through unless they become genuine cultural phenomena. Which brings me back to you. Yes, you, reading this review right now. If you want excellent television to receive the recognition it deserves, you actually have to watch it. Word of mouth only works when the words travel. I tell you something is great, you watch it, you tell somebody else it’s great, and they watch it. That’s how this works. So consider this my contribution to making Last Seen a phenomenon.

Last Seen is a heart-pounding thrill ride that takes a relatively simple premise, subverts expectations, and transforms it into something far more emotionally devastating and intellectually engaging than it has any obligation to be. It understands that family is not always a simple matter of blood, that love doesn’t automatically absolve someone of wrongdoing, and that the consequences of one terrible decision can reverberate through multiple lives for years. Most importantly, it recognizes that the child at the center of this story is not simply an object to be recovered, but a person with her own identity, feelings, memories, and complicated relationships. With a slate of stunning performances, particularly from Brendan Cowell and Chloe Jean Lourdes, Last Seen is a remarkable Australian production that deserves a much larger audience and serious awards consideration. It’s the kind of limited series that reminds me why I watch so much television in the first place, because every once in a while, something comes along that takes a familiar concept and finds an entirely new way to explore it. One of the best shows of 2026, without question.

Fresh: 9.2/10