While it would still be fair to think of Australian actor Patrick Brammall primarily as Kristen’s mountain-climbing cad of a husband from Evil, Brammall is having a pretty spectacular week in terms of showcasing his likable Everyman versatility.

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In Apple’s new six-episode Last Seen, out Wednesday, Brammall plays an alcoholic police dispatcher convinced that his daughter is still alive, 11 years after she was kidnapped and his life fell into a traumatic spiral.

Then one day later, Brammall and real-life wife Harriet Dyer reunite as a mismatched couple brought together by their love for a disabled dog in the third and final season of Colin From Accounts on Paramount+.

In one show, he’s tormented and fraying at the edges. In the other, he’s charming and, well, fraying at the edges. In neither show is he a fun-loving Australian cattle dog, though young viewers and parents of young viewers might know Brammall as the voice of Uncle Rad from Bluey.

If you’re going to watch one of this week’s two Patrick Brammall showcases, it should be Colin From Accounts, a well-written, well-performed throwback rom-com that thrives on the chemistry between its stars, who are also the series creators. It’s quirky and endearingly low-key, and Brammall and Dyer deserve credit for not pushing the thin premise beyond 24 episodes.

As for Last Seen, it feels like the latest entry in television’s recent insatiable love affair with twisty mystery impresario Harlan Coben, even if its actual source material is The Dispatcher by Ryan David Jahn. That means it’s surprising, fast-moving and marred by plot holes and logical chasms you could steer a train through, intelligence-insulting head-scratchers and coincidences that don’t doom the show, primarily because of how good Brammall and the ensemble are throughout.

Apple seems to want critics to be coy when it comes to the plot, which was adapted by Kris Mrksa and directed by Christian Schwochow. I’ll abide, even though Last Seen isn’t a “mystery” precisely, and the basic promotional description Apple is using is built around an incident that takes place a third of the way in (and is, by the time it occurs, not the subject of any uncertainty at all).

Put in non-spoiler-y terms, we’re introduced to Brammall’s Ian Ridley more than a decade after his daughter Maggie went missing. The abduction shattered his life, causing him to fall into a spiral of booze and self-recriminations, ending his marriage to Jessica Wren’s Deb and causing him to either lose or quit his job as the head of the CIU (Criminal Investigative Unit) in beautiful Port McKenna.

Following a storm, human remains surface in the woods — remains that may belong to a young girl, remains that may belong to Maggie. This isn’t great timing for Ian, who has been sober for six months and is enjoying a quieter life answering 0-0-0 (Australia’s 9-1-1 equivalent) calls for domestic disturbances and the like. As soon as his old wounds are opened, Ian’s life begins to fall apart again: His search for closure causes him to ditch his sobriety and the chain of law-enforcement command in an investigation that leads him to fundamentalist recluses Henry (Brendan Cowell) and Jenna (Maxine Peake), who live on an isolated farm with teenage daughter Sarah (Chloe Jean Lourdes).

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Were Last Seen actually intended as a mystery, at least for viewers, the character acceleration that Ian goes through would be nearly impossible to sell. He’s stable for maybe the first 10 or 15 minutes of the show, but by the end of the first hour, his behavior has become completely inappropriate and frequently illegal in a way that would probably be unsustainable.

There’s only so far you can push a character and still treat him as a crime-solving protagonist, and Ian is almost instantly an irredeemable mess in ways the show can’t reckon with. There are things Ian does in the first episode, as his spiral is just beginning, that Last Seen simply decides to ignore or at least move past without ramifications. This becomes standard operating procedure for a show that, even after six episodes, left a bunch of very big narrative questions open — not in a “Don’t worry, we’ll get to that in a second season” sort of way, but in a “Sure, this is an unknown that you’ll never understand but maybe you weren’t supposed to care” sort of way. Some of those gaps I accepted as a reflection of the inscrutability of life. Other things are just clunky storytelling from a show that confuses narrative sloppiness with moral ambiguity.

Brammall plays Ian’s unraveling — desperate grasping from a man who still thinks he can fix things that have been irreparable for years — extremely well. Just as the show doesn’t keep its main revelation secret for long, Ian learns much of the truth long before the closing episodes, making it clear that the thing he has to figure out isn’t what happened to his daughter all those years ago, but a broader sort of empathy that extends to his ex-wife, his son (Tobias Muhafidin’s Dean), the pain they share and whether or not the truth can change anything. Ian thinks “justice” and “revenge” are the goals, but Last Seen is smart enough to know that no resolution here can be tidy or satisfying and that just because it’s easy to feel for Ian doesn’t mean what he’s doing is right.

Cowell, gruff and zealous, and Peake, haunted and kind, are both very good, and Lourdes is exceptional as a young woman forced to confront an outside world she’s been sheltered from.

Mrska and Schwochow can’t always cover up for the believability deficit — Zahra Newman as the town’s new CIU head has one good monologue blasting Ian for his lawlessness, but mostly nobody cares — and there are stretches, especially in the backstory-filling penultimate episode, in which the flimsy rationalizing doesn’t add anything. Still, the series does a very good job of setting up a contrast between small-town beauty and communal values on the one hand and the nightmare situation at the series’ heart on the other. It’s a location suited for cozy parlor mysteries, and nothing is cozy here.

If Last Seen were any longer — most episodes are under 50 minutes — its failures would probably irk me more, but as is I was able to put the stumbles aside and concentrate on Brammall, Lourdes and the murky situation.

I’d still advise watching Evil and especially Colin From Accounts first if you want to look forward to whatever Brammall does next.

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