We TV series ‘The Locator’ premieres on September 6th – 3 stars ***

By Gabrielle Pantera

HOLLYWOOD, CA (Hollywood Today) 9/6/2008 – “Half of the world is looking for the other half,” says Troy Dunn who is ‘The Locator’ in the reality We TV series. “I believe I have one of the best jobs in the world, second only maybe to Santa Claus!” says Dunn. “As long as people continue to seek loved ones, I will be helping people find peace by finding their missing pieces.”

One week each month, Dunn and his staff devote the time and resources to one case they call the Angel Case. The Angel Case usually has an urgent need to find someone and the person doing the searching has exhausted all other possibilities. These searches are the basis of the TV series ‘The Locator’.

“I never intended to spend my life reuniting families,” says Dunn. “It happened by chance, if there is such a thing, when I met a guy who’d been adopted and was successful in locating his biological family. I’d grown up watching my own mother search unsuccessfully for her own biological family.” After tracing the clues, Dunn called his mom to tell her he’d found her mother. As I told her, I could hear her breathing get more rapid and suddenly she began to weep. She wept in a way I’ve never heard her do in all my life. It moved me. It touched me at the center of my core.”

“At that instant, I knew what I would spend the rest of my life doing,” says Dunn. “Reuniting families became my life’s work that Saturday afternoon in 1990, and eighteen years and more than 40,000 reunions later, I continue to be as excited about reuniting people as I was that very first time.”

The title is great and the episodes are heartwarming. But, the execution of the show is slow and plodding to the point it becomes grating. We want to see actual work going into how they locate people.  We want to see how he does it. Not that I want to do it myself, it would just give the audience more delight in seeing the happy outcome if it didn’t all seem too easy.

The show focuses not on the chase, but on the reunion. Where is the suspense? Where are the dead ends? Where’s the great search idea when it seems hopeless?

It needs something to build the suspense and get the audience involved.
It could be more engaging if Dunn was shown solving two different cases in one show. Then as it cuts back between the two cases we’d need the show’s interminable ‘Extra’-style recaps.

You can go to Dunn’s website to try his The Instant People Locator, that combines thousands of somewhat obscure record files into one massive data pool. After trying the instant locator it did fine me, but you can’t get more detailed information without paying for it. If you want to be reunited on TV you can submit your story to the TV producer.

Even thought the show is slow at times, it gives a good feeling at the end, that anything is possible when families are reunited.

‘‘The Locator’’ season one premieres on Saturday, September 6, 2008 on We TV at 9pm/8c.