HBO's Black and Missing arrives perfectly timed months after the Gabby Petito case

Indiewire

Even though the four-part docuseries following founders of the Black and Missing Foundation from Emmy-winning editor Geeta Gandbhir and Soledad O’Brien has been in the works for three years, it couldn't be more relevant in wake of all the attention Petito received. "It’s a by-the-numbers production, but it’s both visceral and data-heavy. Audiences will discover that hundreds of thousands of girls and women reported missing each year go unnoticed, many of them African American, Latina or Indigenous," says Tambay Obenson. "Often presumed runaways, trafficked, or, worse, dead, they are priorities for neither the police nor the press. According to the FBI, 34% of the women and girls reported missing in 2020 in the United States were Black; Black girls and women account for roughly 15% of the U.S. female population. The lack of attention to their cases has prompted a proliferation of organizations like Black and Missing as well as websites dedicated to the search for these women. They represent the familys’ best hope for visibility — and, absent media coverage and police engagement, the families find themselves bearing the full weight of finding out what’s happened to their loved ones. Black and Missing suggests that working-class Black girls and women at the intersection of race, gender and poverty are the least protected and most invisible. For any series to rail against a media landscape that reinforces racially charged images of welfare queens, crack babies, and super predators is a tall order, and there’s only so much Black and Missing can accomplish...Its stories aren’t meant to be twisty, lurid mysteries like Netflix’s widely-popular Making a Murderer, so those seeking an addictive watch will be driven by empathy. A pessimist might argue that, in a country that remains divided largely along racial lines, Black and Missing may inevitably be a sermon preached to the choir. The series simply can’t compete with near-relentless, blanket news coverage of the Petito case; it’s unlikely to embed itself into public consciousness in the same way." ALSO: Black and Missing good at targeting the media's "Missing White Woman Syndrome."