Grief can do a real number on us. When my father died during my first week of law school, there wasn’t anything mysterious about it. He intentionally took too many drugs, and he died. But in the weeks and months that followed, my brain refused to accept the simplicity of that truth. It needed more. Someone else to blame. What about the dealer who gave him the drugs? The paramedics who didn’t do enough? The doctors who got him hooked years earlier? Why didn’t the police investigate?
I couldn’t just let the facts sit as they were. I created alternative theories, some elaborate, all wrong. But in the end, the obvious answer was the right one: he took too many drugs, and he died.
That’s the same uncomfortable realization that haunts Netflix’s three-part docuseries Amy Bradley Is Missing. The series follows the 1998 disappearance of 23-year-old Amy Lynn Bradley, who vanished without a trace from a Royal Caribbean cruise ship bound for Curaçao. The details are chilling but straightforward: after a night of drinking and dancing with her brother and some passengers — including a member of the ship’s band — Amy returned to the family’s cabin around 3:40 a.m. Her brother last saw her lying on a lounge chair on the balcony. At 5:30 a.m., her father checked and saw her still asleep. By 6 a.m., she was gone. No one on the ship ever saw her again.
In the 27 years since, there’s been no confirmed trace of Amy — no body, no firm leads, no concrete evidence. But that hasn’t stopped a wave of theories from emerging, many of them fueled by her family’s grief and amplified by sensationalized media coverage. Over the years, people have claimed to have seen Amy in brothels or on beaches in the Caribbean. A blurry photograph surfaced of a woman on an escort site who resembled what Amy might look like years later. Witnesses said they remembered seeing her months or years prior, but only after they’d been reminded by a news segment or a rerun of America’s Most Wanted.
The docuseries leans into these theories. Was Amy abducted and sold into sex trafficking? Did the ship’s bassist lure her into danger? Could she have been smuggled off the ship in a food cart? Each possibility is dramatized and explored, but none of them hold up under scrutiny. There were no signs of struggle. No gaps in the ship’s security logs. No evidence that anyone gained access to her cabin, or that Amy ever left it.
I get the impulse. I’ve lived it. I wasn’t there when my dad died, so I filled in the blanks. My brain created scenes that never happened. Years later, my brother told me what really occurred, but my memory refused to adjust. I still see the false version. It’s the same thing that happens with movies — I was convinced there was a specific scene at the end of You’ve Got Mail that never existed. But my brain still insists on it.
That’s what Amy Bradley Is Missing captures, perhaps unintentionally: the mental gymnastics we do to turn a tragedy into something more narratively satisfying. If Amy was kidnapped, then there’s still hope. If she was trafficked, maybe she can be rescued. If she’s alive somewhere, maybe there’s still time.
Amy’s father clings to that hope. In the series’ final episode, he tries to explain away all the reasons why she hasn’t called in the last 27 years: “Maybe she’s the victim of Stockholm Syndrome … maybe she’s had children and they’ve been threatened. We don’t know. It just gives me hope that she’s still out there.”
Over the weekend, I read an opinion piece in The New York Times that touched on conspiracy thinking in the MAGA world and the cult of Jeffrey Epstein. The piece itself didn’t break any new ground, but one line stood out: “Conspiratorial thinking is popular not because people are credulous or insane but because it is a graspable idiom, comparable to myth, for expressing aspirations, anxieties and feelings of hopelessness in the face of vast structural forces that would otherwise resist deliberation.”
In other words: We don’t believe conspiracies because they’re convincing. We believe them because they’re comforting and because they give us hope.
Netflix’s Amy Bradley Is Missing doesn’t offer comfort so much as it exploits it. It sidesteps the most likely, tragic explanation — that Amy may have fallen overboard or died by suicide — in favor of wilder theories that keep hope alive and viewers engaged. The truth, after all, doesn’t trend. The Bradley family may know this, deep down. But hope is easier to live with than finality. And in that sense, the docuseries doesn’t so much seek answers as it sells the illusion of them, mistaking conspiracy for comfort, and turning grief into content.
