Kidnapped: The Chloe Ayling Story

Stockholm syndrome does exist and this is thought-provoking television.

Kidnapped is true crime done sensitively but which never forgets its first duty is to reel the viewer in.

As well as a gripping, propellant drama, Kidnapped is a vital and urgent denouncement of how Chloe Ayling was treated.

“Kidnapped” is an odd construction, largely due to Ms. Parkes’s performance. It’s hard to read, and during the early stages the production feels like a documentary, or even a docudrama cast with the real-life characters, because Ms. Parkes does so little to make Chloe heroic, terrorized or much in between. She’s more numb than anything else, which is probably pro-reality, but anti-drama.

Captures an unpleasant phenomenon of the digital age: your confident appraisal of a situation you know nothing about can not only be communicated to the world but directly to the person involved. .... The six-part drama’s opening double bill, however, spends most of its time on the less interesting half of the tale: the crime itself.