(Mini Series) Clickbait - Limited Series that Started of Brightly, Slow Paced Story Telling in the Middle and Ends with a Bang

On Wednesday, I was surprised to see 2 new series released on Netflix. One seemed like a drama mystery series, while the other was a very intriguing and seemed suspenseful Limited Series. Since I am in the mood for a series that would really finish in few episodes, I chose to see this one. Well here we go then.

Brief Story Line

Pia Brewer (Zoe Kazan - Ruby Sparks, The Big Sick etc) has been having strained relationship with his older brother Nick (Adrian Grenier - Entourage TV series, Marauders etc) for a while and had a major fight in front of Nick's wife Sophie (Betty Gabriel - Get Out etc) and their children. But when the following day a video emerged showing Nick in captivity admitting to abusing women and he would be killed if the video views reached 5 million, Pia immediately did whatever she could to find him.

As Pia and Sophie reached out to the police, they were directed to Detective Roshan Amiri (Phoenix Raei) from missing person unit. However, the senior homicide detective DeLuca (Steve Mouzakis) who was assigned to the case did not really appreciate him. The investigation also seemed to be focused on different angle which angered Pia and Sophie. 

So what would happen to Nick and would the police have time to save him? Find them all in this Limited Series.

End of Brief Story Line

When I saw the trailer to this series, I was totally psyched by the prospect of enjoying the suspense from start to finish. And when I noticed it is a limited series, I was even more excited cause mini series would provide us the conclusion without worry of having cliffhanger ending on first season and wait anxiously for a second season. Anyway as I watched the first episode, it really was as per my expectation, where the story was fast paced, suspenseful and intense.

However, once I reached the second episode, I immediately could see that the series would not be playing out the way I thought it would be. It is not bad, but it is not what I expected either. The story shifted its focus on the people in Pia and Nick's life, which was okay but it felt like it became a slow-paced mystery solving kind of series. It's a good thing that I also like that sort of genre so I could still enjoy it, although I would have liked it even more if it stay consistently fast-paced. With such change to the pace and focus, the high intensity was no longer felt and replaced by the curiosity of the culprit and reasons of Nick's kidnapping.

In each episode, the story was told from the point of view of different persons, which was actually quite interesting. There was even one scene that was shown from the perspective of 2 people in 2 separate episodes. But I did find one episode that felt more like a filler for the purpose of bridging the story between 1 episode to another. The person focused on that episode somehow did not get the proper closure. Nevertheless, the other episodes were pretty awesome, especially the series finale which was amazing as it gave a shocking twist that caught me by surprise. 

Series like this would not be good without the support of its cast. In general, they performed their roles well. Aside from the persons I mentioned above, there were also additional cast such as Ian Meadows as Nick's colleague Matt Aldrin, Cameron Engels & Jaylin Fletcher as Nick & Sophie's sons Ethan and Kai respectively plus few others. Of all the lead cast in here, I was only familiar with Betty Gabriel and also Adrian Grenier who played in that popular series. Oh, I also like the background songs playing in the series which were mostly nice.

This mini series does not have opening credits like in conventional series. It only showed the title Clickbait plus the title of the episode. And I kept on looking if the series was based on anything. Which it did not. So the series creator Tony Ayres (Director of Walking on Water and creator of Nowhere Boys TV series etc) and Christian White did a wonderful job in creating such story and developing them into something interesting. Tony Ayres also served as writer and co executive producers.

In a way the series felt a bit like its title, a clickbait, where you were given a teaser and you got interested in finding out the content, but was not what you expected. As I said above, lucky I still like the real content and it did not make me totally upset and disappointed. So if you are interested in watching a mini series that started of sensationally but having a completely different way of story telling subsequently and an ending that would totally shock you, then you can certainly give this a try. However, if you prefer nonstop thrill & suspense, then you would not really get it here, as only the first and 8th/final episode that fit such category. 

Mike's movie moments rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars 

Note from Wikipedia:

Clickbait is a text or a thumbnail link that is designed to attract attention and to entice users to follow that link and read, view, or listen to the linked piece of online content, being typically deceptive, sensationalized, or otherwise misleading. A "teaser" aims to exploit the "curiosity gap", providing just enough information to make readers of news websites curious, but not enough to satisfy their curiosity without clicking through to the linked content.