Don’t let this Clickbait trick you-it’s not worth it.Ĭlickbait premieres Wednesday, August 25th on Netflix.Īllison Keene is the TV Editor of Paste Magazine. It evokes the same “why did I get involved in this?” feeling of being lured under false pretenses to an article that leaves you feeling tricked. The whole thing leaves me wondering who this was for, or what the series was even trying to say. Across the eight episodes, directing duties have been split amongst Brad Anderson, Emma Freeman, Ben Young, and Laura Besley. The series is produced by Matchbox Pictures, Tony Ayres Productions, and Heyday Television. It’s also particularly awful in its implications towards its female characters, leading to a conclusion that plays into the worst, most cynical, and deeply misogynistic assumptions possible. Clickbait is an upcoming Netlfix Original crime-drama miniseries created by Tony Ayres and Christian White. Worse still, its ending feels like a unearned and smug “gotcha” that further dilutes any possible point the show might have had earlier on. I wish it could be the kind of Lifetime movie-level story that one could cuddle up and cackle along with instead it’s deeply miscalculated in its delusions of grandeur. And yet, it’s too boring and offensive to be camp, either. This is yet another series that wants to be taken seriously thanks to the trappings of prestige drama, but gives us nothing but dreck. It’s actually astonishing how little we know about any of them after eight episodes, although frankly they never really seem to be worth knowing much about.įor those still not deterred, the series does give the crime itself a clear ending with a full explanation by the end, and boy howdy is it terrible. Unfortunately, in between solving the crime, so much of Clickbait is spent vacuously attempting to meditate on its characters, who give us nothing in return. The investigation aspect of Clickbait isn’t terrible at first, but it could have been distilled into a single episode of, say, a show called FBI: Cyber Crimes. None are interesting, except perhaps an episode that focuses on an associate producer who will do anything to get a story, and is able to use cheaply-bought data from apps to help crack open an important element of the case. Each episode focuses on one of them as the story moves along: The sister, the detective, the mistress, etc. No thanks!Īgain, Clickbait starts off by flirting with some compelling thought exercises, but it’s flattened by paper-thin characters. It’s like someone heard a podcast about deep fakes, watched an episode of Law & Order, remembered Catfish exists, and then wants to explain The Unified Theory of the Internet Today to you three drinks in. It takes a kitchen sink approach to its storytelling, alighting on everything from expectations of privacy and data collection to catfishing, content moderation, revenge porn, and more-but doesn’t make a real point about any of it. Any of the interesting ideas raised by the series are subverted not to make us question our relationship with online media, but to undermine any decent point the series might have made. Is the man they know and love an abuser? Possibly a killer? Can they understand, perhaps, the vigilante’s motives?īut again, like a good (read: bad) clickbait article, once you get in there, it’s all nonsense. But there’s also a question of how they grapple with what the video suggests. Family man Nick Brewer (Adrian Grenier) is kidnapped, beaten, and forced to hold up cards for an internet video that claim “I abuse women” and “I killed a woman.” As if that wasn’t provocative enough, it ends with: “At 5 million views I die.”įrom there, Nick’s wife Sophie (Betty Gabriel), his sister Pia (Zoe Kazan), and his sons Ethan (Cameron Engels) and Kai (Jaylin Fletcher) work with police and race (or amble, really) against the clock to try and track down who made the video and where Nick is now. As user pineappleprincess522 wrote on the show's subreddit, "He escaped his captors and is running away and there was nowhere to go that would make more sense than to Dawn's house? It's insane.Like a good (read: bad) clickbait article, Netflix’s new eight-episode miniseries Clickbait draws you in with a compelling premise. Nick could have gone to the police, but instead, decides to confront his clearly emotionally unstable co-worker. After Simon releases his wrongfully accused victim, Nick decides - for reasons we still don't know - to go immediately to the person he realizes is behind all this: Dawn. There's another question about Simon and Nick's time together that still has viewers scratching their heads, and it could also impact to what degree Simon is held responsible for Nick's death. If Pia is bent on revenge - a potential plotline for a follow-up series - her stance on Simon will have a major impact on how she goes about it. Nevertheless, Simon didn't "pull the trigger" himself, and, to an extent, is just as much a victim of Dawn's catfishing as Nick, his family, and the women on the receiving end of it were.
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