THE ENEMY WITHIN

When a teenage girl goes missing with her boyfriend, her father’s frantic investigation exposes a web of secrets inside their leafy, gated community

We adore a good mystery, don’t we? It doesn’t matter if they’re set i n mea n urban streets or picturesque university towns, in the Caribbean or on the Dorset coast, we can’t get enough.

But just when it seemed as though there couldn’t possibly be a new way to tell a crime story, along comes something completely different. Thrilling new eight- par t series Safe pits the best of British and American talent together to produce a heartstopping tale set within a gated community in England.

Written by best- selling author Harlan Coben and Danny Brocklehurst, the Bafta- winning wr iter of Shameless, Safe is set in a sunny, comfortable, upper-middle- class world of big houses and big gates which is meant to be – well – safe. With its glossy inhabitants and range of suspects and red herrings, the show has a touch of Desperate Housewives with a hint of Broadchurch. For a British show, it feels very slick and American with a relentless pace.

‘Audiences will be emotionally and intellectually engaged by all the twists and turns,’ says Michael C Hall, the former star of serial killer drama Dexter and lead actor in Safe. ‘It’s a domestic thrill ride.’

Harlan says he deliberately wanted to set his story in a place that appeared safe from the outside. ‘Sometimes we build walls thinking that we can keep the bad out but maybe, in reality, what we are doing is locking the bad in.

‘It is, I hope, a gripping crime drama but it is also about the ties and bonds that hold together a community. I wanted to tell a story about how hard it is to raise our children in today’s world and about the unique challenges of having teenagers. How far will we go to protect our families? That’s the heart of the story.’

The Netflix show has Michael as Tom Delaney, a widowed doctor whose teenage daughter Jenny and her boyfriend Chris both go missing after attending a house party.

‘He’s a military veteran and paediatric surgeon, so quite accomplished and capable,’ says Michael who adopts a good English accent for the role. ‘But as a single father he’s often at a loss and increasingly out of his depth.’ As a former mili- Main image: Sophie Mason and Tom Delaney. Above: Tom with Pete (right) tary man, he’s not afraid to do a lot of detective work on his own, helped by clues from spyware he has installed on his daughter’s phone. ‘He copes with Jenny’s disappearance by ultimately taking things into his own hands in order to find answers and track her down. He needs to take action.’

There are a host of families under suspicion within the gated community. Chris’s family are already struggling after his French teacher mother is arrested, accused of having inappropriate relations with a pupil. Meanwhile teenager Sia, who held the party, and her parents are keeping information secret that they should have told the police.

As the story moves on, it appears everyone has their own dark secrets, their own reason for wanting to hide the truth. Tom himself may know more than he appears to at first – his

daughter had clearly still not forgiven him for something to do with her mother’s death.

Sh e rlo ck’s Ama nd a Abbington appears as the smal l- town detect ive Sophie Mason who is trying to piece it all together. She’s rather compromised. Not only does she live in the same gated community as the missing girl, with her estranged husband living in a caravan in the front garden, but she is also having an affair with Tom.

‘ She has a complicated and intimate relat ionship with Tom and she also has a son who is very ill throughout the ser ie s ,’ says Tom’s missing daughter Jenny Amanda. ‘She has to navigate all these problems while still investigating several crimes and juggling being a parent.

‘But everyone has their secrets and you never know what is going to happen next. It really is a rollercoaster of a drama. There were even audible gasps rippling through the read-through when secrets were revealed.’ Helping to investigate the disappearance is new policewoman Emma Castle, played by Hannah Arterton, who has left a big city job under mysterious circumstances. We quickly gather she is in the area to do her own investigations on Tom’s best friend, hospital anaesthetist Pete Mayfield, played by Hustle star Marc Warren.

‘ She has her own private reasons for going to this town but when she gets there she discovers this whole missing girl situation moves much more quickly than she could have ever suspected,’ says Hannah. ‘I love the idea of a mystery going on in this world. It’s beautiful leafy suburbia. Everyone lives in big houses and seems to know each other. It all looks perfect but it isn’t – there is all this stuff going on and in the course of the investigation revelation after revelation comes out.’

Although it is set in an unknown southern town, the eight-part show was filmed in Manchester using various large Cheshire homes.

‘Harlan was particularly keen that the place should look sunny, which wasn’t always easy in Manchester,’ says Marc Warren. ‘It has to look like a bright, rich, middle- class world. All the secrets are brewing underneath, in the darkness.’

At the heart of it is Tom, a conflicted and flawed father who grows increasingly desperate in the search for his daughter. ‘ I hope you are genuinely moved by Tom’s quest to save his daughter,’ says Harlan. ‘I want you to feel for these families, heart and soul, but I also want to rock you back on your heels with shocks and surprises. You may think you know where this story is headed, but you don’t.’ Safe is available now on Netflix.