The Crimes Cable Won't Cover—David Frum
TV One
It’s a grim joke about cable news that a missing blonde teenager will transfix the nation for weeks, while a dozen young people of color can vanish without meriting even a mention.
A new TV series seeks to correct that bias.
Thelma Butler remembers well planning a quaint Valentine’s Day dinner with her daughter, Pamela, in February 2009. The 79-year-old Washington, D.C., native spoke to Pamela by phone just two days before the big day, to make sure she had all the details exactly right.
That phone call was the last time Thelma Butler spoke to her daughter, then 47, and nearly three years later, she still wonders why. Tomorrow night the TV One network tackles Butler’s case in the first installment of the docudrama Find Our Missing, a show dedicated to telling the stories of missing persons of color. Hosted by Law & Order veteran actress S. Epatha Merkerson, the show will feature accounts of two people who have gone missing without a trace in each hourlong episode.
The home news aspect is this: I’m very proud to be able to say that the company producing the series is Towers Productions, headed by my college classmate and friend Jonathan Towers—who was for the past three years my business partner in the FrumForum website.
Congratulations to Jonathan—and please tune in to watch a series that will not only rectify a depressing disparity but that will also, like all Towers shows, surely be exciting TV.
