Last Seen brings a missing-child thriller shot on Coastal Victoria to Apple TV this month

Patrick Brammall leads Apple TV’s new Australian thriller Last Seen, filmed across Victoria about a former detective who believes his missing daughter has called for help. The six-part series premieres globally on September 9, with the first two episodes.

Brammall plays Ian Ridley, who lost his three-year-old daughter Maggie disappeared from the seaside town of Port McKenna 11 years ago. He now works as a police dispatcher in the same town and is haunted by her disappearance.

The show begins with a landslide exposing the remains of a young girl. Local police treat the find as Maggie, but Ian doesn’t believe that and begins to clash with local Detective Senior Sergeant Izzy Pena (Zahra Newman). All this happens while Ian is trying to stay sober, and remains close with ex-wife Debbie McGuire (Jessica Wren), who is now eight months pregnant to sergeant Bill McCracken (Bert LaBonté). When home-schooled teenager Sarah (Chloe Jean Lourdes) makes a dispatch call that reaches Ian’s desk, he becomes convinced it’s his daughter calling for help.

Last Seen is adapted by Kris Mrksa from award-winning crime writer Ryan David Jahn’s 2011 novel The Dispatcher. The book set is set in East Texas and early development pf the show considered a United Kingdom setting. The story moved to Australia because the scale of the country can support a child living unnoticed close to home.

Most of the shoot took place on Victoria’s west coast, including the Shipwreck Coast. The real life town of Portland, Victoria stands in for the fictional town of Port McKenna in the show. Other filming ran through Warrnambool, the Mornington Peninsula and the Upper Yarra Valley, where the Reid family farm was established in the foothills. The most remote site was Warrock Station, a colonial homestead near the South Australian border that had never been filmed. Hours from Portland and Melbourne, it is a cluster of neogothic weatherboard buildings, built by a cabinetmaker, that function almost as a small town. The production used it as an isolated compound.

The style for the show was intended to evolve past a standard outback look. The geography shifts between surf-coast edges, rugged inland terrain and long connecting roads. Production designer Chris Kennedy, whose credits include Lion, The Road and Lawless, assembled that world from sites across the state. Bonnie Elliott ACS shot it. Elliott was the first woman to win an AACTA Award for cinematography in television, for Seven Types of Ambiguity, and later shot Stateless. Cappi Ireland designed the costumes. Her credits include Lion, The Dry and Fires.

Christian Schwochow directed all six episodes. His previous work includes The Crown, Bad Banks and Munich: The Edge of War. Mrksa is lead writer and an executive producer, with Australian credits including The Slap, Underbelly and Glitch, and later British series including Requiem and The Murders at White House Farm. 60Forty Films produces with Melbourne’s Werner Film Productions. Joanna Werner, Jamie Laurenson and Hakan Kousetta are among the executive producers.

Brammall co-created and starred in the comedy series Colin from Accounts, which has won Logies and an AACTA Award. Last Seen gives him a sustained dramatic lead across six hours. Chloe Jean Lourdes makes her screen debut in the series. Sho plays a home-schooled teenager that resembles an aged-up version of Ian’s daughter Maggie. Lourdes is from Sydney’s Northern Beaches, had not appeared on screen before. She came through an open call and a shortlist of about 30 young performers. Colin Friels, Taylor Ferguson, Tobias Muhafidin and Felix Cameron round out the cast in key supporting roles.

Filming ran for about 20 weeks at Docklands Studios Melbourne and across regional Victoria, supported by VicScreen’s Victorian Screen Incentive and the federal Location Offset. Government figures put the contribution to the state economy at around $50 million, including several million spent in regional communities, with hundreds of jobs for cast and crew and hundreds of local businesses engaged.

The first two episodes premiere on Apple TV from September 9, with new episodes weekly through October 7.