“I abuse women. At 5 million views, I die.” The fatal consequences are right there, but come on, be honest with yourself: you’d want to know the story behind that confession. You might even click play.
That’s how good Clickbait works: it makes you want to engage, even though you know it can’t possibly be good for you. With all eight cliffhanger-heavy episodes available on Netflix now, Clickbait stars Adrian Grenier as a respected family man caught in a high-stakes online game of life, death and reputation.
Clickbait was filmed in Melbourne and created by Aussie producer Tony Ayres and best-selling novelist Christian White, although you wouldn’t know it from the American accents in the slick trailer below.
Zoe Kazan and scream queen Betty Gabriel star as the accused man’s sister and wife respectively, left scrambling for answers as that viewer count creeps higher and higher. Probably the first time a YouTuber has done the exact opposite of begging viewers for likes and subscribes.
The addictive thriller series aims at “revealing the ever-widening fractures we find between our virtual and real-life personas”, and we’ll probably have to wait until the final tantalising episodes to find out whether Grenier’s character really is the monster he’s being exposed as.
“He’s the victim here”, Kazan pleads in the trailer above, but we can’t know if that’s true or not until we get a chance to see the show for ourselves. It’ll be good fun to spot the ‘burbs of Melbourne in the background; hopefully some local talent might even pop up as the anxious witnesses to a firmly internet-age cautionary tale.
