Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Never Seen Again’ on Paramount+, A Docuseries About Inexplicable Disappearances And The Ones Left Behind

Never Seen Again is an eight-episode docuseries from Paramount+ that presents cases in which people suddenly and mysteriously went missing, with each story told from the perspective of the family members and friends left alone to wonder just what happened. The series opens with a two thirty-minute episodes that explore the unsolved disappearance of a Black man in Florida, and how filmmaker and actor Tyler Perry was inspired to get involved in his case. 

NEVER SEEN AGAIN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Marcia Williams looks solemnly at the camera as she holds an oversized photo of her son, Terrance Williams. Never Seen Again will use a similar image for each of its episodes, revealing the missing and those they left behind.

The Gist: On January 12, 2004, Terrance Williams disappeared. Born and raised in Chattanooga, Tennessee, Williams was living and working in Naples, Florida, where he’d recently moved with his mother, Marcia Williams. Witnesses saw Williams in his car at a Naples-area cemetery, and talking to a deputy with the Collier County Sheriff’s Department there. Then he was placed in the back seat of the squad car, and never seen again. Marcia Williams and her family spent three days on the phone, searching for Terrance. But when a lead on his towed vehicle led them to the scene at the cemetery, the deputy said it never happened. “I never arrested nobody,” Steve Calkins says in a phone call with his dispatcher. And after some good-natured chit-chat, she takes his word for it.

Tyler Perry says he was compelled to lend his voice to the Terrance Williams case because it was so inexplicable. How can a man, a father of four, just vanish without a trace, and the least helpful person in his disappearance is a sheriff’s deputy who was the last person to have seen him. Perry explains how he brought the case to the attention of prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump, who pressured the sheriff’s department to depose Calkins under oath, which they did in 2020. Never Seen Again compares footage from that deposition to Calkin’s incident report a month after the disappearance, and highlights the discrepancies in his story. Also featured is a recording of another phone call the deputy made to his dispatcher, in which he refers to “a homie’s cadillac” and towing Williams’ vehicle just for fun. “It was almost as if, when you heard him talking,” Crump says of the call, “you imagined somebody putting on blackface.”

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Never Seen Again joins a crowded field of true crime docuseries; it even cops a bit of the stuttering cello from the 48 Hours theme for its own intro. The Terrance Williams case itself has been covered on Dateline NBC as well as the ID series Disappeared.

Our Take: At a brisk 30 minutes, episodes of Never Seen Again aren’t here to do an investigative deep dive. But that doesn’t mean the material doesn’t have punch. In the first episode, “Driven Away,” the emotional hook is provided by Marcia Williams, who has never stopped pressing for answers in her son’s disappearance. Perry shows some emotion, too, mentioning his own child and how awful it would be to wake up one day to a loved one gone mysteriously missing. But Never Seen accesses some hard data, too. The recordings from Deputy Calkin’s 2020 deposition, his incident report and interview with internal affairs from 2004, and the glaring phone call to his dispatcher full of racist invective are all damning, and pretty impressive primary sources for a true crime entry. The series does suffer from a lack of available footage. The same ancient video clip of Steve Calkins seems to reappear every few minutes, and static aerial views of the Naples area stand in for anything substantive as the recorded audio interviews play. But the testimonials from Perry help break that up, and in the end, there’s more than enough mystery here to justify a viewing. There’s also a nod to our contemporary world. Where once there would have been a posted phone number, now there’s a QR code and the onscreen prompt: “Get Involved.” It’s like Never Seen Again says in its intro. Somebody out there knows something.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: The final moments of this first episode of Never Seen Again set up its second part, which will explore the connections between the Terrance Williams disappearance and that of a second man. Marcia Williams receives a call from the Mexican Consulate in Miami telling her that a Mexican national named Felipe Santos also went missing after last being seen in the back of Deputy Calkins’ patrol car. Perry is incredulous. “I think that anybody in law enforcement could look at this and go ‘What happened to them?’”

Sleeper Star: The deer-in-headlights daze that comes over the face of Collier County Sheriff’s Office representative Lt. Mark Williamson when he’s asked about Culkins’ phone call to the dispatcher in which racial slurs are used and they joke about towing Williams’ car out of spite is pretty classic. “Well…what I can say about the phone call that was made to dispatch is that it sounded unprofessional.”

Most Pilot-y Line: Tyler Perry says he got involved in the Terrance Williams case because something “unfathomable” had happened. “I just wish people would take a moment and just imagine,” Perry says. “Somebody you love disappears. Just ripped away from you, with no answers.”

Our Call: Stream It. It’s a fair question Never Seen Again asks the audience: what would you do if your loved one was just suddenly gone? But as it presents these cases, it’s also casting a QR code net for any solid intel from its viewing audience. Maybe someone can be found.

Johnny Loftus is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift. Follow him on Twitter: @glennganges