Sometimes a TV show does just about everything right, and yet . . . one still doesn’t feel any need to make a habit of watching it.

Such is the case—for me, at least—with the new ABC drama Missing. Ashley Judd stars as a former CIA agent whose college-student son is abducted while studying abroad in Rome, Italy.

The show reverses the sexes of the excellent Luc  Besson movie Taken, with Judd replacing the film’s protagonist played by Neeson, and in search of her son instead of a daughter. That can be an excellent idea, as Howard Hawks showed with his brilliant ploy in his classic film His Girl Friday, and it works quite fine in Missing.

There’s also a clear influence of the USA Network series Covert Affairs, with Judd’s Missing character constituting  a version of CA’s Annie Walker a couple decades later in life.

In Missing, Judd gives an excellent performance as the intrepid single mother and major league tail-kicker Becca Winstone. She executes the action scenes admirably, and her expression of anguish at finding out about her son’s abduction falls just short of scenery-chewing. It’s convincing.

In addition, the showmakers’ hearts appear to be in the right place: Missing gives every evidence of having been conceived to entertain and perhaps mildly enlighten, which is what the best TV series tend to do (cf Covert Affairs, mentioned above).

Unfortunately, the story line and suspense tropes in Missing are so familiar that the sex changes and overseas settings—Rome, Paris, a transnational passenger train—cannot make the show new in any meaningful way. Judd is always appealing in these suspense dramas, and the CIA chief in Paris is characterized as having some interesting thought processes, but Missing just doesn’t have enough other unusual elements to make it worth committing to on a long-term basis.

The show drew a large audience for last week’s premiere episode, landing among the top 10 drama shows for the week. Unfortunately, it seems likely many of them will go missing themselves in the weeks to come.