TV Pick of the Week: Black Snow - review by Yvette Huddleston

On the night of her 21st birthday party Zoe Jacobs (Jana McKinnon) quietly leaves the lavish celebrations laid on by her wealthy property developer family and she has never been seen since. More than twenty years later a clue unexpectedly turns up when, during a routine police search, her backpack is found and the case is reopened, with Cormack brought in from Brisbane to investigate.

In the opening episode of the six-part series we find Cormack in a vulnerable state. This is the first case he has worked on since being signed off work with stress, and a condition of his return is that he undergoes sessions with a therapist to determine whether he is fit for active service. He assures his boss that all is well and heads to Moorevale. There he is teamed with local police officer Samara Kahlil (Megan Smart) who was a close friend of Zoe’s throughout their teenage years and right up until her disappearance.

For Zoe’s family the discovery of fresh evidence stirs up complex emotions – while they want some sort of closure, they are at the same time scared of what the investigation might uncover. Living without a definitive answer is unbearable but it at least allows room for hope. Zoe had always said she was intending to travel and many of her loved ones cling to the idea that she is alive and has made a life for herself elsewhere.

However, as Cormack and Kahlil begin to question all the witnesses who had been interviewed twenty years ago, they start to find new leads and unanswered questions that would seem to point to the fact that Zoe may not have left Moorevale after all. The well-scripted narrative moves back and forth in time, charting the events in 2003 leading up to Zoe going missing including the tragic loss of a close friend to suicide, the discovery that her father Leo (Dan Spielman) is having an affair, her tense relationship with her volatile mother Nadja (Victoria Haralabidou), an intense relationship with an older man and difficulties with her clingy ex-boyfriend, the spoilt son of a local politician. It all makes for very compelling viewing.