In the hushed corridors of Britain’s most exclusive enclaves, where polished oak panels conceal centuries of whispered indiscretions and the air hangs heavy with the scent of entitlement, the line between guardian and ghoul blurs with terrifying ease. Enter Gone, ITV’s latest six-part psychological thriller, a serpentine descent into the rot beneath prestige that has already ensnared critics and crime aficionados alike as “gripping,” “deeply chilling,” and a masterstroke of unease that eclipses even the coastal confessions of Broadchurch or the confessional cruelties of The Sinner. Announced on November 24, 2025, this fictional fever dream—penned by the razor-sharp George Kay (The Long Shadow, Hijack) and helmed by director Richard Laxton (Mrs Wilson, The Thief, His Wife & the Canoe)—unfurls against the foreboding tapestry of a storied private school, its encircling forest, and the unassuming sprawl of Bristol. At its venomous core: the inexplicable vanishing of Sarah Polly, devoted wife to the school’s venerated headmaster, Michael—a pillar of the community whose sudden spotlight as prime suspect ignites a conflagration of buried scandals that threatens to raze the institution to its manicured foundations. With a cast blending the brooding gravitas of Sherwood‘s David Morrissey and the steely resolve of Downton Abbey alumna Clare Higgins, Gone isn’t merely a missing-person procedural; it’s a scalpel to the soul of privilege, probing how elite bastions breed monsters in their midst, and how one woman’s absence can unmask a labyrinth of lies so personal, so profane, it leaves viewers questioning the shadows in their own backyards.
The series ignites in the crisp autumn hush of Bristol’s outskirts, where the elite enclave of Willowbrook School stands as a monument to unassailable superiority—red-brick Gothic spires piercing the fog, playing fields manicured to surgical precision, and a faculty sworn to uphold the myth of moral invincibility. Michael Polly (Morrissey), the silver-tongued headmaster whose baritone commands assemblies and boardrooms alike, embodies this facade: a widower turned devoted husband, his tweed jackets and measured smiles masking a man forged in the fires of academic ascent. When Sarah (yet to be cast, but teased as a luminous foil to Michael’s reserve) dissolves into ether one rain-lashed evening—her Volvo abandoned at the forest’s fringe, keys glinting like accusatory eyes—the machinery of suspicion whirs to life. No ransom, no body, no trace beyond a half-read novel splayed on the passenger seat and a cryptic note in her planner: “The roots run deep.” Michael’s alibi? Ironclad—a late-night symposium on classical ethics, corroborated by starstruck alumni. But in the unblinking gaze of Detective Superintendent Annie Cassidy (Myles), the cracks spiderweb outward.
Myles, the Welsh powerhouse whose turn as the haunted Gwen Cooper in Torchwood and the unyielding detective in Broadchurch has made her a synonym for simmering intensity, imbues Annie with a quiet ferocity born of overlooked scars. A Bristol native overlooked for promotions in a force still riddled with glass ceilings, Annie arrives at Willowbrook not as an intruder, but an unwelcome mirror—her rumpled raincoat and no-nonsense interrogations clashing with the school’s performative polish. “You lot build walls with words,” she snaps in the pilot’s taut opener, her Welsh lilt slicing through Michael’s avuncular charm like a switchblade. As the investigation burrows deeper, Annie uncovers the school’s underbelly: a alumni network laced with political puppeteers, faculty affairs veiled in “mentorships,” and a hidden ledger of hush money for “indiscretions” that span decades. Sarah wasn’t just a headmaster’s wife; she was the quiet curator of these confidences, her therapy sessions with wayward students a confessional that hoarded dynamite. Was her vanishing a silencing, or a scream deferred?
What elevates Gone beyond the procedural pack is its unflinching excavation of institutional rot, a theme Kay weaves with the precision of a coroner’s thread. Inspired by the forensic tenacity chronicled in To Hunt a Killer and the real-world grit of former Gloucestershire Detective Superintendent Julie Mackay—whose career dissected complex familial fractures—Kay’s script transforms Willowbrook from idyllic ivory tower to pressure cooker of perversion. Episode 2 plunges into the forest’s maw, where search parties unearth not Sarah’s remains, but relics of the school’s shadowed history: a rusted locket etched with initials from a 1980s scandal, whispers of a “midnight society” where prefects initiated rites that blurred consent and curriculum. Michael’s facade frays under Annie’s scrutiny—his office, a sanctum of leather-bound tomes and framed accolades, yields a locked drawer of anonymous letters, each a venomous valentine from Sarah’s past. “She saw too much,” one reads, the ink faded but the threat eternal. As Alana Polly (Appleton), Sarah and Michael’s daughter and a junior classics tutor at the school, grapples with filial doubt, the series morphs into a familial autopsy: Alana’s poised lectures masking panic attacks, her loyalty to father clashing with unearthed diaries revealing Sarah’s quiet rebellion against the school’s patriarchal stranglehold.
Morrissey’s Michael is a tour de force of veiled villainy, a reunion with Kay after their BAFTA-nominated collaboration on The Long Shadow, where he embodied the Ripper’s spectral shadow. Here, channeling the coiled menace of Sherwood‘s grieving miner, Morrissey layers Michael’s benevolence with subterranean rage—his sermons on “character forged in adversity” ringing hollow as Annie uncovers his role in quashing a prior assault allegation. “We’re not suspects; we’re stewards,” he intones during a faculty lockdown, his eyes betraying the flicker of a cornered animal. Myles counters with Annie’s dogged humanity, her off-duty pints in Bristol’s harborside pubs a respite from the school’s suffocating etiquette, where she confides in a grizzled sergeant (Nunn) about her own marital implosion. Their cat-and-mouse pulses with intellectual eroticism: late-night stakeouts in the forest’s gloaming, where Annie’s flashlight catches Michael’s silhouette pacing the treeline, or a clandestine meeting in the school’s abandoned chapel, rain drumming on stained glass like accusatory fingers.
The ensemble amplifies this claustrophobic tension, a constellation of talents drawn from British TV’s prestige pantheon. Emma Appleton’s Alana is a revelation—her wide-eyed idealism from The Killing Kind hardening into desperate duplicity, her classroom soliloquies on Ovid’s metamorphoses doubling as metaphors for the school’s shape-shifting sins. Jennifer Macbeth (Maternal) slinks as the deputy headmistress, a viper in velvet whose “pastoral care” conceals a web of coerced favors. Arthur Hughes (The Innocents), bringing neurodiverse authenticity to a reclusive groundskeeper whose savant-like recall of the forest’s every rustle unravels timelines, adds poignant layers to the probe. Elliot Cowan (Foundation) embodies the entitled scion, a former pupil turned trustee whose yacht parties mask predatory patterns, while Billy Barratt (The White Princess) injects youthful volatility as a scholarship student teetering on expulsion’s edge. Rupert Evans lurks as a shadowy solicitor with ties to Michael’s alumni cabal, Jodie McNee simmers as a vengeful ex-staffer, and Oscar Batterham’s wide-eyed prefect hides horrors behind house colors. Clare Higgins, the Downton Abbey grande dame whose glacial poise chilled Crawley drawing rooms, materializes as the school’s ancient patroness—a dowager whose “generous endowments” come with strings of silence.
Filmed across Bristol’s verdant fringes—from the serpentine paths of Leigh Woods to the austere halls of Clifton College doubling as Willowbrook—Gone bathes its revelations in a palette of bruised twilight and institutional gleam, Laxton’s lens transforming fog-shrouded oaks into accusatory sentinels. Kay’s dialogue crackles with the precision of a locked-room puzzle: faculty mixers devolve into verbal jousts, where Michael’s toast to “unbreakable bonds” hangs like a noose, and Annie’s interviews peel psyches like onions, tears mingling with truths. Midseason crescendos in Episode 4’s “The Hollow Oak,” a nocturnal excavation yielding Sarah’s scarf, bloodied and bird-pecked, forcing Alana to confront her parents’ marital mausoleum—a marriage of convenience masking Michael’s infidelities and Sarah’s suppressed fury at the school’s grooming undercurrents. The deeper the dig, the more Gone interrogates privilege’s peril: Willowbrook as microcosm of elite impunity, where “character building” expeditions double as cover for assaults, and legacies are laundered in Latin mottos.
Critics, privy to advance screeners, are already anointing it ITV’s next prestige pinnacle. The Guardian dubs it “a slow-simmering scalpel to the jugular of class complicity, outpacing Broadchurch‘s communal grief with sharper, more intimate incisions.” Radio Times praises its “uncomfortably personal” gaze: “Kay doesn’t just expose skeletons; he makes you complicit in the burial.” Viewers, starved for the procedural depth of The Sinner‘s confessional coils, flood forums with fevered speculation—#GoneITV trends with timelines pinning Michael’s alibi to a forbidden tryst, or Alana’s complicity in a cover-up born of daddy’s girl delusion. Social buzz amplifies the unease: fan art of the forest as a devouring maw, podcasts dissecting parallels to real scandals like Eton’s hush funds or Harrow’s hushed histories.
As Gone barrels toward its 2026 premiere—slated for ITV’s Sunday-night throne, post-Grace‘s procedural perch—the series stands as a clarion call: in the groves of academe, no secret stays scholastic forever. Michael’s unraveling isn’t villainy unveiled; it’s the myth of meritocracy mauled, a headmaster’s halo slipping to reveal horns. For Annie, it’s redemption wrested from the wreckage—a detective who hunts not just the vanished, but the voids we all harbor. In Bristol’s brooding embrace, Gone whispers a truth as old as the oaks: the elite don’t disappear; they dissolve, one complicit glance at a time. And when the embers settle on Willowbrook’s pyre, what remains? Not ashes, but the acrid aftertaste of truths too twisted to bury. Tune in, if you dare—the school’s bells toll, but the real requiem is the one we write in silence.
