These aren’t ordinary kidnappers. Even if $20 million is at stake, the the expense they’ve incurred to pull it off is astonishing (not to mention the high body count).
Something else must be going on. If the motive is revenge against Conrad Cain rather than money, he must have done something really terrible.
I guess the season being shortened to 13 eps means the main story will be resolved fairly quickly. A lot sure happened tonight.
I’m hoping it picked up some viewers. Did it?
I should have posted this link to critical reviews in the OP.
“The most tautly written of all the new serialized dramas.”
““Kidnapped” plays out like a point-by-point criticism of everything “Vanished” gets wrong.”
“The show doesn’t look as if it will get too complex for its own good, the mystery has an internal logic that works and, best of all, there are moments… that suggest the creators are constructing some real flesh-and-blood characters.”
It’s really quite good. NBC has the episodes on line, but I think if someone wanted to start watching now, they wouldn’t be lost.
Knapp (Jeremy Sisto) used to be an FBI agent but now acts on his own to rescue kidnappees. He has some history with agent King (Delroy Lindo). The kidnap victim’s father has some skeletons. One of the victim’s keepers is sympathetic to him. We don’t know who the kidnapper is, and he has insulated himself with layers of technology and disposable minions.
Knapp visits a man in prison but we don’t know why – speculation is that someone Knapp was close to was kidnapped and never found, and that the prisoner was involved.
The dialogue is snappy but not unrealistic. It’s fast paced but not at the expense of characterization. There’s no soap.
If you can stand to put one more serialized drama on your schedule, this should be the one. If you can’t, well, rent it when it comes out on DVD, cuz it’s good!
Once the show received the death sentence, I gave up on it.
I might have given up too, but they promised that the major part of the story will be resolved before it goes off the air.
Does that help?
It’s only a TV show – small potatoes in the scheme of life – but it’s disheartening when they do such a good job and don’t have an audience.
I picture producers and writers looking at what happened with Kidnapped and wondering why they should even try.
There was so much serious stupid in the last episode, I turned it off.
Murderous suspect loosely handcuffed in back of car, wife slips suicide pill to husband
That’s only two little things! 
I did wonder where the suspect hid whatever she used to get out of the handcuffs.
(No need to spoiler box – it’s just you and me, apparently!)
No, I’m here as well. I’ve been watching the show, but in some disbelief. You made a good point about the $20 million not being enough to justify the trouble, expense and headcount. The scope of the kidnapping conspiracy is a little hard to believe.
What was the subplot in last week’s episode when Knapp left a bug in the offices of that mysterious quasi-governmental spook shop? Were they suggesting CIA involvement in the kidnapping? And an early episode suggested that Conrad Cain’s father was mobbed up, so perhaps there’s a mafia connection as well.
In some respect, I’m glad that the show isn’t going on indefinitely. Perhaps that means the writers will wrap up the whole thing in a reasonable amount of time. The lack of closure is one of the frustrations I’m getting from Lost. (And that’s also one of the advantages of British dramas, which have shorter series.)
As for what went wrong with this show, I think there were too many serial dramas this season (I thought I read that five hour-long serial dramas were introduced). A lot of people are reluctant to commit to something like that. Perhaps they should have started this show over the summer.
You mean at The Gracon Group? (sp?) I don’t think Knapp was leaving a bug – they were trying to plug into their mainframe to get an ID on somebody (the guy who tried to kill Virgil in the hospital, I think). They had traced the bullet to weapons used by that organization.
There’s definitely a lot going on – almost too many players.
I was thinking of the movie, “A History of Violence”, but then Tim Hutton does a whole bunch of idiotic things…
NBC has pulled the show from its schedule but will allow you to watch the remaining eight episodes on the NBC.com website.
Well, f***! And dammit!
Thanks. I would have been screaming at the TV Saturday night otherwise. 
Thank God they pulled it! Law & Order: Criminal Intent simply doesn’t get rerun enough. It’s important to clear out sufficient space on the schedule.
I’ve been watching on-line. New eps are posted every Friday. There’s just one left, which will probably wrap up who’s behind the kidnapping, as well as the other subplots. So many questions though, like why King was being set up, who killed Claire, where’s the Accountant now, and what’s up with Knapp’s buddy in prison.
The show stayed good, and a couple of eps (including today’s) were heart-stoppers. I’m looking forward to the DVD. It’d be great if it could be expanded to include the whole story as the writers envisioned it, but I don’t know if more than 13 episodes were made.
Well, for anyone who’s interested in the resolution but didn’t watch on-line, here’s how it turned out. There were a few improbabilities, but hey, it’s dramatic fiction. 
Leo was rescued from Mexico in last week’s episode. Many dead bodies, including the two original kidnappers.
FBI Agent Archer was behind it all. His son died while waiting for a heart transplant. He found out that Leo Cain got the heart that was supposed to go to his son. Ellie was responsible for that – she either bribed someone or used her family’s friendship with the surgeon, it wasn’t explained.
Archer set out to bring the Cain family down, and used his FBI status to find out about Cain’s business, and he dated Cain’s mistress to get info about his personal life. This took years, and when he had it all together, he decided it wasn’t sufficient to destroy the Cain family. Hence the kidnapping.
He financed the kidnapping using money stolen from a drug raid. I suppose being an FBI agent gave him connections to the bad guys he used, as well as the technology. I should have picked up that it was an inside job 8 episodes ago, because nothing they did went right.
The 9 episodes we didn’t see probably delved more into all the machinations – setting up King for stealing the drug money, hiring Virgil as Leo’s bodyguard, bringing a brand new agent from Alaska to work on the case, killing Claire and preserving her body, etc.
In the last episode, Archer started killing people to cover his tracks. Then he went to the Cain apartment and held a gun on Leo while he told Ellie and Conrad why he did it. In the meantime, King and Knapp had figured out Archer was the bad guy (thanks to dead Claire’s mother). King set himself up with a rifle in the apartment across from Cain’s and shot Archer through a window.
One of the things that really impressed me about the writing was that they showed the after effects on Leo. He didn’t just go home and take up his old life. He was shaking, hugging his mom, having nightmares, etc. The kid’s gonna have a hard time.
I think everything about the show was excellent. The last shot was Kellogg, out of prison, calling Knapp on the phone and teasing him about taking up his old life, so there’s a nemesis for a second season.
Nothing left hanging, except for The Accountant. He’s still out there.