Safe review – Michael C Hall’s odd, synthetic British accent is symptomatic of this Netflix drama

There’s something about Michael C Hall’s British accent that doesn’t quite ring true, but I’m finding it hard to put a finger on it. It is definitely a British accent. If you heard it out of context and were asked where it was from you would say Britain. Where in Britain, though – geographically, in the social hierarchy – would be tougher to pinpoint. It’s like a generic British accent that Hall, best known for being Miami serial killer Dexter, has produced. Technically sound but synthetic, rather than living-breathing real.

Hall’s accent may not be the most interesting thing about Safe, but it might be symptomatic of it, certainly of its setting; a bourgeois gated community somewhere in England. It is a good place to set a drama, and at first glance it looks like how you imagine those places would be: big kitchens with concertina doors on to nice outdoor areas, pools, Audis and Range Rovers, community barbecues, a little light adultery, precocious teenagers partying hard the moment their parents leave the gates, pills and beer-pong.

But it soon becomes clear that the behaviour gets more extreme than that. When a body is discovered floating face down in the pool at the popular local princess’s house party, her parents – a comedy couple, ghastly and likable at the same time – don’t go to the police as you might expect. Instead, they opt to put the body in the chest freezer in the garage. (How did little Sia get the body out of the pool on her own, btw?)

Oh, and speaking of putting a finger on it, later they defrost the dead geezer’s hand, with a hot water bottle. They do that to use his thumb to unlock his phone and post something on social media, to give the impression he isn’t dead after all. The Marshalls are master criminals and make the Corleones look like amateurs. Then Sia bonks someone else over the head with a bottle.

And it’s not just the Marshalls who have things to hide. Everyone does. It’s like the bloody Killing Fields over there. So Hall’s character, Tom, a surgeon, had something to do with his wife’s death, we don’t know what. It’s something his 17-year-old daughter Jenny can’t forgive him for. Tom’s current girlfriend is local police chief Sophie (Amanda Abbington), whose husband, a drunken Irishman (whoop whoop, racial stereotype alert) lives in a caravan on the drive. New cop Emma, transferred from the big city, spends her spare time photographing Tom’s best mate Pete with a long lens. Who knows what she’s up to, but it looks like no good. And Pete was the last person to be seen with Jenny ... we’ll come to that, it’s quite important.

We haven’t even mentioned the Chahals. He is the angriest man in the world, she is a French teacher accused of having an affair with an underaged pupil. Their son Chris is just chillin’ ... in the Marshall’s freezer.

Not a whole lot of ringing true going on then, it’s pretty tonto. Which might not matter, but what looked at one point like it might be Netflix’s Broadchurch – the disappearance of a teenager, a parent’s anguish, the effect on a community, the police investigation – soon starts to look more like Desperate Housewives. I’m very much enjoying these people, without really caring about them.

What Safe does have – by the shovel-load – is plot. As you would expect of an idea from prolific and super-successful American crime writer Harlan Coben (then brought to screen by Danny Brocklehurst), it floors it straight from the off, then twists through chicanes and hairpins to leave you hanging on for dear life.

Jenny disappears from the community barbecue, she has had enough. Has she run off with love-interest Chris? No, because it’s Chris who was face down in the pool, now face up in the freezer, still Instagramming away from heaven. It was Pete who picked her up from the party. He says he’s gay, but is he? Sophie’s on the case, with dodgy Emma, but Tom doesn’t seem to trust them, even though Sophie is his girlfriend. He launches his own investigation, with his own accent, that doesn’t quite ring true. Literally everyone is a suspect.

So while you might not be kept awake at night, lying in bed worrying about a parent’s grief, or how much freedom a teenager should be given, or pondering the reality – and maybe the morality – of the gated community ... Well, to be honest, you probably won’t be lying in bed at all. You’ll be up, bingeing, wolfing down the episodes, doing that thing: the midnight Net-feast.