Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Accident’ On Hulu, A Drama About A Small Welsh Town Dealing With A Preventable Tragedy

When you watch a TV show about a traumatic event, you usually get an idea of what happened before the characters who aren’t involved do. But what if you’re just as in the dark as the people who were left to sift through the evidence and figure it out, including the victims’ loved ones? That’s the idea behind The Accident, which takes place and is shot in South Wales. Read on for more.

THE ACCIDENT: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Shots of a small village in South Wales as daylight breaks. We see a hairdresser coloring a woman’s hair inside her house.

The Gist: Glyngolau is a town that has fallen under tough times over the past few decades, as the industries that employed many of the people in the village have left town. But things are looking up; a new factory development called The Light, which includes a high-rise office building, is being built on the outskirts of town, and will bring in thousands of jobs. Hairdresser Polly Bevan (Molly Lancashire) is excited because her husband, town counselor Iwan (Mark Lewis Jones) negotiated the deal.

There’s a fun run around the town on this morning, and the day starts with Polly finding her teenage daughter Leona (Jade Croot) in bed with an older guy. She seems nonplussed by it, even telling the guy to jump down to escape. Her relationship with Leona is a bit complicated, but it seems that she and Iwan are still affectionate, as we see when he dresses in a banana suit for the fun run.

As the fun run is going on, we see some other townspeople, including Debbie Kethin (Genevieve Barr), whose husband Alan (Kai Owen) supervises the construction on site. At the same time, Leona joins a large group of her friends into the depths of the construction site in order to tag parts of the new construction. Then, there’s an explosion.

As the rescue operation commences, authorities are surprised the teens were inside. During the operation, though, after only a few people have been removed, most of the building collapses. Many of the teens don’t make it out, and Debbie’s husband is also killed. That’s when the questions start. Harriet Paulsen (Sidse Babett Knudsen), an executive of the developer on the project, goes to Glyngolau, and is immediately confronted by Polly, who says the construction was “cheap as chips”.

At the hospital, though, Polly is one of the few who gets good news; Leona is alive, though severely injured. She was saved by a mysterious man named Martin Harris (Shaun Parkes), who just happened by the site when the explosion happened. Iwan, citing his poor relationship with his daughter, refuses to come to visit her, but he is more or less in hiding, due to the fact that he was the one who brought the project to town. As Polly confronts him about it, their affectionate relationship takes a more violent turn.

Our Take: The Accident aired to acclaim on UK’s Channel 4 in October, and it’s easy to see why. The four-part miniseries, created by Jack Thorne (National Treasure) is an emotional and tense examination of how an accident can send a tight-knit town into a downward spiral of accusations and finger-pointing.

Thorne doesn’t take a ton of time to set up the story; we’re introduced to the main characters and the accident happens by the 13-minute mark. We’re given the perspective of the Paulson, the parents and the rest of the town: We don’t know what happened, why those kids were in there, and why the building collapsed after what seemed like an isolated explosion. That stomach-sickening feeling of not knowing is definitely well-replicated in the first episode, where everyone goes from a positive feeling about the direction of their town to a dizzying sensation that peoples’ lives are being irreparably ripped apart.

Speaking of which, the visuals, shot in South Wales, are as big a part of this show as anything. The small town that’s hundreds of years old, the greenery, the rolling hills… it all gives the viewer a sense that this accident is sort of their 9/11, the most traumatic event in that town’s long history.

That nauseating sense of “just what happened?” is what will keep us watching. As Iwan gets drawn into the investigation, Polly will have to defend her marginally creepy husband as well as be angry about what happened to Leona. It seems the fingers will also point at Debbie, because her husband was the construction manager. And, of course, Harriet will be on the hot seat. Because this is a closed-ended 4-part series, we likely won’t go down too many dead ends in order to find out at least some of what happened.

Sex and Skin: We see Debbie having sex with her husband that morning, and there’s a romance between Harriet and her colleague Tim Das (Nabhaan Rizwan). More on that in a second.

Parting Shot: We see Harriet outside the Bevan house; Iwan is drinking tea at the front window, seemingly unfazed by what has happened.

Sleeper Star: Jade Croot has to act with blinking at the end of episode 1, and we don’t know how the accident will affect Leona going forward. But we liked her presence, even when she was snarking off to Polly.

Most Pilot-y Line: We’re not sure what the romance between Harriet and Tim is all about. And it seems that Iwan’s violent streak is fully accepted, even welcomed, by Polly. Both pieces may be integral to the plot, but feel extraneous in the first episode.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Accident is one of those shows that get going quickly but doesn’t need a ton of exposition to hook you in. You want to know why all of this happened, and finding out even a little bit will be intriguing to watch.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

Stream The Accident On Hulu