Netflix has made it abundantly clear, content is what matters. Quantity over quality. They are picking up films and series from all over the world, spending millions on new properties, with plans to spend millions more. Occasionally, these “originals” have paid off. But more often than not, they seem to be scraping the bottom of the barrel lately. Unfortunate, since their early offerings were terrific, before they began buying their originals. When they took risks with fresh content, rather than playing it safe by buying completed works, Netflix looked unstoppable. As it is now, they’re throwing shit at the walls and just seeing what sticks. And their latest fare is a perfect representation of that.

This week, a new series premiered, a co-production between Netflix and Canal+, Safe. The series stars Michael C. Hall with a “British” accent, and a slew of other lesser known English stars. Hall stars as Tom Delaney, a widower with two teenage daughters, living in a gated community. His eldest, Jenny, goes missing following a house party, and Tom is forced take matters into his own hands to discover what happened. But as he delves deeper and deeper into the the mystery, we find the neighbourhood is filled with dark secrets of its own.

“Tonight – Heaven.”

Safe has a perfectly serviceable cast. Amanda Abbington (Sherlock) and Marc Warren (Hustle) offer adequate support, that almost makes you able to ignore Hall’s ridiculous accent. And let’s talk about that. Now, This Guy loved Dexter, or like, half of it. Michael C. Hall is a terrific actor, but his voice, my god. He sounds almost like he’s trying to do an impression, of Peter Dinklage’s impression of an English accent. It’s just not exactly good. When you can get past that, his performance is fine, as expected, but he’s certainly an odd choice for the lead in a British mystery series.

Where the series truly fails in it the execution of a pretty easy-to-nail setup. Young girl goes missing. Desperate father will stop at nothing to find her. Dark secrets abound. What can go wrong? Well, a lot, if you let it. The creator (author Harlan Coben) just seems to besnatching ideas from a hundred different story ideas, and trying to bring them all to life at once. We have a missing daughter, a dead body in a freezer, a best friend with a dirty secret, a beautiful teacher being framed for sexual indiscretions, a desperate family trying to cover their tracks. And this is all in the first episode. By the time the second one ends, we get this weird “twist” of an ending involving a nameless character we only met five minutes before, as if it’s supposed to be some huge reveal. But you just scratch your head, wondering ‘why?” There is no focus, nothing to really grab you, and with so many characters, oddly enough there aren’t many with reasons to care about them.

Overall, Safe is a real swing and a miss for the ‘Flix. All the ingredients are there for a solid little whodunit. But much like AMC’s The Killing, there is just too much going on, and not enough reason to bother. Now, we are only two episodes into an 8-episode season, so we’ll have to see. But it has to try harder to make us want to.

This Guy Scores It: 5/10