Each of the eight episodes of “Clickbait” focuses on a different character, with episode titles like “The Sister,” “The Detective,” and “The Wife.” First up is Pia, who takes everything personally and who feels guilty about her last interaction with Nick. Next is Sophie, who has a secret of her own and is trying to hold the family together. Later on are Ethan and Kai, who fear the worst but whose lives spent entirely on social media give them a different, nearly symbiotic, relationship with what is happening to their father. And Roshan and journalist Ben Park (Abraham Lim), who see in this case an opportunity to advance their careers, also get their own standalone episodes—and their choices serve as a commentary on the very “clickbait” nature of the show’s content.

That shift in perspective per installment isn’t so drastic that the “truth” of events changes from person to person, and that restraint is the right choice. “Clickbait” is already so reliant on jarring narrative reveals (often complemented by Kazan’s stricken, mouth-agape face) that experimenting with subjectivity vs. objectivity would have been too much. Instead, each focused chapter allows a peek into characters’ interior lives. The actors grab onto those opportunities and sprint forward, and the series benefits from their lack of artifice.

Kazan is the series’ anchor as the brash Pia, all contemptuous energy, guilty glares, and stomping strides, and she sparks well against Gabriel’s Sophie, who is more contained and constrained. “Clickbait” attempts to make a point about how the white Pia can be hysterical in a way that the Black Sophie can’t, and although the series doesn’t take the idea quite far enough, at least it raises it. The same nod of acknowledgment applies to Roshan’s homelife, which includes his family speaking Persian and Roshan’s time praying at a mosque. It’s depressingly rare in Hollywood for an actor of Iranian descent to play a character of Iranian descent who isn’t a terrorist, and Raei has the right kind of bearing to fall into fairly handsome, slightly smarmy cop roles. Is there a “Law and Order” spinoff that needs a new detective? Raei could work!

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