Clickbait - Netflix (eight episodes)
It's hard not to make a pun about the show's ridiculous title, but Clickbait mostly put its name to good use in an interesting eight-episode season about the perils of YouTube and social media when a crisis occurs. But like with most click bait, the interest is high in the beginning, but dies off in a big way towards the end, when you realized you've been duped. I won't say that's exactly how I felt at the end, but the ending was an incredible dud.
A seemingly ordinary man named Nick Brewer was capture and forced to make a horrific video that was posted on YouTube. In the video, he was forced to hold up signs he wrote, stating that he has mistreated and murdered women. If the YouTube video got enough views (or likes or whatever it was), Nick would be killed. A few days later, Nick's body was found dead in a forest.
As a sidebar, I'm not going to get too deep into the sad state of our society's addiction to social media, but you can bet the farm that millions and millions of people would watch a video like this in real life without giving a second thought to the consequences. The point of the show isn't to lecture kids on using social media, but I sure don't mind taking a minute to point out how realistic this situation is, and how sad our society is in general when it comes to social media. Because if that happened in real life, millions of people would click on it for sure.
Getting back to the show itself, an investigation was launched into Nick's murder, and the police eventually uncovered a big misunderstanding and a neat little mystery that unraveled the story into very different directions than what the first couple of episodes indicated. While I didn't care for the method (more on that later), the story mostly got more exciting and dramatic.
Then the ending happened, and it reminded me why the term "clickbait" has a negative connotation and usually leads to a bust when reading a story on the Internet. The majority of the season posed the question "Who framed Nick, and why would they do that to such a good guy?" Different suspects pop up here and there with valid backstories that made them fulfilling would-be suspects. Yet in the end, the grand villain behind the whole thing turned out to be an elderly woman who worked with Nick. This lady helped Nick set up his computer when he first started working at his new school, and she knew his password. At first, it started with snooping around his photos, but her nosiness continued to escalate to the point that she was "catfishing" women on social media while posing as Nick. Yes, this reveal was as ridiculous as it sounds. The catfishing this elderly woman did led to a young woman's death, and this young woman's brother is the one who tracked down Nick and threatened to kill him on YouTube. It's only at the end when the brother realizes Nick wasn't the reason his sister died, so he freed Nick. But Nick ended up seeking out the elderly woman because he figured out what she did, which turned out to be a mistake because this elderly woman and her husband apparently have enough pride in whatever little reputation they have in life to justify killing Nick on the spot. It was such a middling, non-sensical end to a story with quite a bit of build-up that really could've gone about a dozen far more interesting directions than this silly finale provided.
While the content of the story itself was mostly great until the end, the method to the storytelling wasn't my favorite. Each episode focused on a different character. The overarching story progressed, but each episode provided new backstory to a few key moments (some of them were revisited a couple of times, but not many. It's not like this was a version of Vantage Point). It was clunky and not really clever. There was really no rhyme or reason for the order of the character spotlights from episode to episode. It may not sound like much of a problem, but for me, it really felt like the backstories not only were oddly timed, but their backstories only loosely connected to the main through lines and plot points, which made them feel shoehorned in. The gimmicky nature of the mechanic completely derailed the true feeling of character progression and depth. You'll mostly care about what happens next instead of what happens to a particular character, and I don't care for writing with that much imbalance.
A few years ago, young actress Zoe Kazan turned in what I felt was one of the most underrated performances in recent years in The Big Sick, so I was hopeful to see some great acting, particularly considering the exaggerated nature of the story. But in actuality, she mostly was relegated to a one-note character, which, yes, made sense for the purposes of the story, but she didn't really bring anything unique to the character. And honestly, she was only so-so with the role, anyway. Zoe played Pia Brewer, the sister of Nick. Pia showed the expected extremes one would feel after losing a loved one (not to mention family drama that unfolded), but there was no subtlety or nuance in what she brought to the character. She always had an angry, bitter undertone driving most of her scenes, and her character became less interesting as the show progressed. There was one plot turn that involved Pia trying to follow up on a lead that might clear Nick's name (which had been run through the mud to this point), and this turn provided a bit of reprieve as the character had a new motivation and determination about her. Still, that mostly felt too little, too late.
The rest of the acting was pretty ho-hum, as well. Betty Gabriel may have been the brightest spot of the rest of the bunch. She played Sophie, Nick's wife and Zoe's sister-in-law. Sophie's arc took many turns. At times, you feel sympathetic for her loss, at other times, enough of her dirty laundry is aired to the point that we strongly dislike her. She definitely walked that fine line quite nicely, and she played into the tension of any situation better than the rest of the cast. But even she had a few moments of cringe.
The biggest dud acting-wise was Phoenix Raei, who played Roshan Amiri, the lead detective on the case of Nick's death. Phoenix was romantically interested in Zoe, but he knew he had a duty to uphold first and foremost, but rather than play into that juxtaposition, he mostly ignored it. In the few opportunities Phoenix had to shake off the tough-cop persona, he proved to be dull and uninteresting. Even during the portions of his story that involved shady behaviors to further his career, we didn't get any dimension or range for the character during these situations that made me feel any sense of regret or trepidation on his part. What a waste.
All in all, not a bad show. I do appreciate that the story seemingly concluded everything. No openings for a second season, and I hope it stays that way. It's a decent one-and-done type of show.