To its credit, Eye Candy has more going on than your average MTV scripted fare. It’s pretty disturbing at times and thoroughly fucked up, especially when it switches over to the serial killer’s narration as he enters his Internet date’s house and is completely thrown off by something as small as her crooked teeth. “They’re all liars, playing their online games,” he seethes via voice-over, irrationally angry that she didn’t mention her teeth in her online profile. He’s a psychopath obsessed with perfection, and he kills her. In the second episode, he dumps gasoline all over a woman waiting for a spa treatment. Because Eye Candy is a TV thriller, the vast majority of its female characters are just waiting around to be bait for this psycho murderer — but at least he’s sort of an equal-opportunity serial killer: plenty of men get murdered, too. Eye Candy doesn’t want you to get too close to any of its secondary characters, because they’re killed off just as swiftly as they’re introduced. (Also, just about every bland white male on the show looks the same and is totally interchangeable… but, again, TV.)
Eye Candy sets its sights on technology. Lindy is a tech-savvy hacker (a “white knight cybervigilante”) who can easily access personal information about anyone on the Internet. Her best friend Sophia (Kiersey Clemons) sets her up with an account on an Internet dating site called — you guessed it! — Eye Candy. The killer targets women that he’s met on the site, meaning Lindy’s reluctance about using it becomes an asset when she begins to date her way toward meeting the serial killer in order to take him down. (And, oh yeah, at some point, about a day or two after she is taken off parole, Lindy agrees to be part of some Cyber Crimes Unit alongside another hot, young cop who also has a crush on her. Eye Candy is essentially a Hot Cop Calendar.)
Yet, even with the murders and the disturbing images, Eye Candy lacks real fears or any sense of urgency. Perhaps it’s because I also watched the entirety of Black Mirror, a wickedly creepy take on the darker aspects of technology, over the weekend, but the technological scares in Eye Candy — the hidden cameras, anonymous text messages, a phone shoved into a dead man’s mouth — failed to land because it seemed so trying. All of the show’s content is right there on its surface, with no room for ambiguity, and the dialogue is so clunky that it can come off as comical. And it’s not even worth getting into the complete implausibility of 90 percent of what’s happening here. But Eye Candy is a serviceable introduction into dark and thrilling noir narratives, and thus seems destined to become a hit with teen (if not adult) viewers.