Netflix's Clickbait: Adrian Grenier Takes a Dark Turn in Viral Thriller — Grade It!
The internet may have decided that Adrian Grenier was the real villain in The Devil Wears Prada, but in the actor’s new Netflix limited series, his character’s innocence remains up for debate.
Simply put, Clickbait stars Grenier as Nick Brewer, a seemingly average — but still frustratingly handsome — physical therapist who finds himself at the center of a potentially fatal cyber crime. A viral video features a bloody Nick holding up several signs, ranging from “I killed a woman” to “At 5 million views, I die.” It’s a regular “Charlie Bit Me.”
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But the simplicity ends there, as the show begins to unravel Nick’s life and paint a slightly more complicated portrait than the one his friends and family would like to believe. Each of the eight episodes focuses on a different member of Nick’s inner circle, from his sister Pia (Zoe Kazan) to his wife Sophie (Betty Gabriel), the former of which is the subject of Episode 1.
Titled “The Sister,” Clickbait‘s premiere wastes no time depicting Pia as a loose cannon. She gets booted from her own mother’s birthday party for making a drunken scene, she eats all of her roommate’s yogurt, and she watches porn and cat videos at all hours with her laptop’s volume on full blast. Just an absolute monster person.
So it comes as a bit of a shock when Pia is revealed to be a nurse, one with a surprisingly warm bedside manner. This comes in handy when she asks Vincent, one of her teenage patients, to help her “hack into Google or something” to figure out who kidnapped Nick. Granted, Vincent is also helping Pia because he likes her — which leads to an incredibly awkward almost-kiss towards the end of the episode — but that’s neither here nor there.
As with so many TV mysteries, the police are unhelpful at best and dismissive at worst. When Pia insists that Nick’s video is a “death threat, not a confession,” one particularly smarmy officer replies, “It could be both.” And that’s the conclusion they reach without even hearing the suspicious late-night voicemail Nick left for Sophie shortly before his disappearance: “There’s some stuff going on, something we should talk about.”
Thanks to Vincent crowdsourcing the investigation online, the feds actually manage to track down the vehicle in which Nick’s video was filmed, albeit after it reaches 5 million views. Unfortunately, the episode cuts out before we get a peek inside. That’s right, folks, this show is going to make us wait for answers.
And answers we need! Like, what’s the “stuff” Nick wanted to tell Pia about? Who is the mysterious “AL_2005” with whom Nick’s son is sharing information? And does every man on this show want to have sex with Pia?
These questions and more will be answered as the season unfolds, but there’s one question that only you can answer: Will you keep watching to find out how it all ends? Weigh in via our polls below, then drop a comment with your review of Clickbait‘s opening hour.
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