#sorry my dude! that was Bad. i will see what else is on iPlayer

[notasapleasure]

I finished Safe.

I think...... it's worse than anything I ever watched for James Purefoy. Even The Following. (NB I never did manage to see Goose on the Loose with Chevy Chase).

But I did have a brief obsession with Barry Pepper and watched Battlefield: Earth because he was in it. That was enough to kill off that obsession, let me tell you.

So Safe isn't the worst thing I've ever seen but my god it wasn't good.

It really felt like a story that had been written set in the US and transposed to the UK without much effort at localising it. Cops and high schools prevailed. The actual sense of the gated community among....the local neighbourhood? And how that connected to 'town' (London?) was vague as hell.

The reveals all fell somewhat flat because there wasn't any build up really to hang them on - it's not a good mystery if there aren't any cues for your audience to miss/misread. It seemed so determined to keep every character suspicious for as long as possible that emphasis landed on things that ultimately had little to no emotional heft (Emma's pregnancy and dead boyfriend) or characters were just left completely hollowed out, with zero motivation or purpose (Neil, who never did get a job assigned to him).

It left the main character in a sub-Taken style frenzy largely of his own making (don't spy on your daughter's phone??) and honestly, I struggled to care about his plight when there's another young girl who's brother has been murdered, mother has been sleeping with her student, and whose father is incapable of being emotionally open but did dob his wife in for csa.

In case you're wondering, she apparently never was convicted of csa! Maybe Ioan's mum didn't notice because she was too busy doing boxercise. Maybe Ioan was over the age of consent (the emails referencing a fifteen-year-old were faked after all). Pete apparently deemed it 'top bantz' seeing as he only groped a teacher when he was at school. Given that his newly found daughter was very keen to prosecute earlier in the show I hope they don't fall out over their vastly different attitude to teacher/pupil relationships!

Anyway. Joplin, the reason I put myself through this ordeal! He had very little to work with and put his whole pussy into what he was given. He was given a chance to get into Neil's private grief a bit after Chris' body turned up (but zero catharsis in the final episode when Chris' killer was revealed because that was actually all about how the main character Has Another Sad because his girlfriend is a murderer :(( wah), and he shone in the brief funeral scene in a display of silent, ashamed distress. In another writer's hands he might have been the main character. In Safe, he didn't even appear in the final two episodes, having forgiven his wife for her sins and been forgiven for his own apparently.

The writing was riddled with unpleasant, classist, bigoted assumptions: the Marshalls being framed as gauche, TOWIE-style new money who go from comic relief to getting their comeuppance (via that nasty dig about prison rape) was the clearest example, but there was also the Dramatic Reveal of Craig's scarred face and the whole mental-hospital-as-sinister-source-of-secrets trope. I asked husband, who used to work in a public library, if Harlan Coben was on a James Patterson level and he said that was a bit harsh. I think, from exposure to Safe, he might have changed his mind about that.