Last Seen first look: Patrick Brammall changes lanes for thriller series

You loved him in Colin From Accounts and Offspring! You grumbled about his unnecessary character from The Devil Wears Prada 2, which is not his fault, but the writer’s.

And now Patrick Brammall will front the very first Australian original series from Apple TV, a thriller called Last Seen.

The streamer has released the first look at Last Seen – a pun that could not be resisted – which finds Brammall working in a different tone as a police detective, Ian, whose young daughter disappeared 11 years earlier.

In the present, Ian works as a police dispatcher - which, you might remember, were also character types in No Activity, but Brammall played an in-the-field detective on both the Australian and American versions of that series.

During a shift, Ian takes a call from a teenage girl he is convinced must be Maggie, his missing daughter, and thus begins a thrilling quest to track her down and reunite her with her family. The emotional stakes are high, it’s the only thing for which he lives.

Last Seen will span six episodes and is adapted from the book The Dispatcher by author Ryan David Jahn. German filmmaker Christian Schwochow directed the series, which was filmed in Victoria last year.

It also stars Brendan Cowell, Daniel Henshall, Jessica Wren, Zahra Newman, Chloe Jean Lourdes and British actor Maxine Peake.

Production company 60Forty Films has worked on a slate of other series for Apple TV, including Slow Horses, Hijack, The Essex Serpent and Down Cemetery Road.

Despite launching in November 2019, Last Seen is the first Apple series that could be considered a proper Australian production.

Earlier, the platform had commissioned an adaptation of Shantaram based on Gregory David Roberts’ tome about an Australian bank robber who escaped Pentridge Prison and fled to India in the 1980s.

The rights to a screen version had bounced around and lapsed before landing at American production house Anonymous Content and studio Paramount.

In 2019, it was announced the series would shoot in Melbourne and India, and Australian filmmaker Justin Kurzel would helm the first episodes. British actor Charlie Hunnam had been cast in the lead role.

Shantaram had attracted tax breaks from the federal and Victorian governments but the production was beset by drama including a change in showrunner after original writer Eric Warren Singer fell behind on the scripts and was eventually replaced by Steve Lightfoot.

Filming was also disrupted by both the Indian monsoon season and by Covid shutdowns.

After a production pause of more than a year, Kurzel left the project although he remained credited as an executive producer, and most of what he had shot of the early episodes was scrapped.

British-Indian director Bharat Nalluri, who is married to an Australian journalist and is partly based here where he has also worked on local shows including Boy Swallows Universe and Last Days of the Space Age, took over as set-up director. Filming also moved primarily to Thailand.

Ultimately, there was little Australian input into Shantaram although it did feature local actors Fayssal Bazzi, David Field, Rahel Romanhn and Arka Das in supporting roles.