Stream It Or Skip It?

Amy Bradley Is Missing is a three-part docuseries, directed by Ari Mark and Phil Lott, that examines the case of the aforementioned Bradley, a 23-year-old woman who disappeared off a cruise ship a few hours before it docked in Curaçao on March 23, 1998. The directors speak to Bradley’s parents, Ron and Iva and younger brother Brad, as well as passengers and crew members, and FBI agents from the St. Thomas field office that came on board and investigated.

Opening Shot: A shot of a cruise ship, home video footage of Amy Bradley, and an interviewer asking someone, “What do you think happened to Amy Bradley?” The response? “I don’t know.”

The Gist: According to Brad Bradley’s account, he and Amy stayed up late on the ship, and hung out on the balcony of the stateroom they shared with their parents at around 4 in the morning. Ron Bradley says he saw her lying on the balcony at around 5:30. By 6, she was gone.

But when the ship docked in Curaçao, the crew was obligated to let the over 2400 passengers out to visit the port of call, which means that Amy could have disappeared in that crowd. The crew didn’t search the ship until after that, and she was nowhere to be found there.

A few passengers saw Amy dancing with Alister “Yellow” Douglas, the bassist from the band that played on deck that evening, at an on-ship night club, but the bassist denied he had anything to do with Amy’s disappearance. A solo traveler who was in the stateroom next door to the Bradleys was also questioned (and interviewed for the series), but he was also eliminated quickly by the feds.

Once Iva and Ron returned home, reluctantly leaving the ship before the cruise ended, they mobilized, contacting every agency they could think of. When a picture of Amy circulated in the media, a witness who saw her four months later spoke up.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Strangely enough, Amy Bradley Is Missing debuts the day after another docuseries about the unsolved disappearance of a young woman in the 1990s, Her Last Broadcast: The Abduction of Jodi Huisentruit.

Our Take: Something feels missing from the first episode of Amy Bradley Is Missing, and it was hard for us to put our finger on it while watching. While we appreciated the fact that Mark and Lott jump right into the case, starting more or less the day Amy went missing, there’s very little background about Amy in particular or the Bradleys in general to give us context.

Perhaps that’s on purpose. As there is a shift in the investigation starting with the tip that Amy might be alive, we might get more insight into what her life was like leading up to that cruise. We see plenty of old pictures and home videos of Amy, and the ones from when she was in high school or early college gave some subtle hints that there might be more going on with her than her “attractive recent college grad” looks — and her parents’ insistence that she wouldn’t jump overboard or do anything else that’s nefarious — might indicate.

Is there a chance that she escaped to start a new life? Maybe, but it seems that most of the supposed sightings of Amy after her disappearance were false leads; women with dark, short hair weren’t exactly a rare thing in 1998. But what we do know is that she hasn’t been found, either dead or alive, in the 27 years since her disappearance.

True crime series about cases that are still open tend to frustrate us because they deal in a lot of speculation, false leads and red herrings because facts are in short supply. So you then get the filmmakers talking to crew and passengers who think she took a swan dive off the balcony, or was murdered and thrown off the ship, or that Yellow had something to do with it. We get the feeling that all three episodes are going to go in this direction, without making the necessary connections between all that speculation and what was actually going on in Amy Bradley’s life at the time she vanished.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode.

Parting Shot: We hear from the man who claimed he saw Amy Bradley in Curaçao four months after she disappeared.

Sleeper Star: We give Wayne Breitag a lot of credit for being willing to be interviewed for the series, given that Iva Bradley called him “odd” and that the directors don’t do him any favors with the clips of his interview they decided to include. Even if the guy is a little strange, why do him dirty like that?

Most Pilot-y Line: The speculation about how Alister “Yellow” Douglas may have been involved went right up to a line that we were getting uncomfortable with, and it seemed like the filmmakers didn’t make enough effort to backtrack from that.

Our Call: SKIP IT. We’re not sure you can get anything new from Amy Bradley Is Missing; the first episode is rife with speculation, and given the fact that the case is still open, we’re pretty sure the other two episodes will be, too.

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.