MTV is back at it with their newest attempt at a scripted drama series, Eye Candy, based on the novel of the same name by R.L. Stine.

Eye Candy TV Review

The show has a very fast pace about it, the plot moves very quickly as we are introduced to characters just as quickly as they are killed off and while at the same time following an all too predictable story line. However, there is a twist: online daters are supposedly never to be trusted, but in this series that’s the only way to catch a killer.

Eye Candy is based in New York, where Lindy Sampson (Victoria Justice) lives as a computer hacker. Three years ago, Lindy lost her younger sister in the drive through of a burger joint. Unable to save her sister from getting kidnapped, Lindy has since become a rogue investigator by default, trying to help other victims like herself find missing family members. She just recently ended a 6 month probation period and broke up from her now ex-boyfriend, cop Ben. At the insistence of her polar opposite best friend, Sophia (Kiersey Clemons), Lindy joins the show’s version of Tinder, ‘Flirtual,’ to find a potential suitor, which leads to her having a sociopathic stalker with a penchant for killing instead. This killer wants the perfect partner and believes Lindy is his perfect specimen, but in the meantime he spends his time killing imperfect online daters. There also seems to be an idea that the online killer might have a connection to Lindy’s sister’s kidnapping but it looks like that realization might not be revealed until the end of the season.

The acting on the show is at best tolerable, and the perfectly placed moments of thematic drama, like the inability for Lindy to get out of her car due to perfectly placed drive through railings, makes the show a familiar tale. Pubescent girl gets kidnapped in a seemingly wholesome place, while countless bystanders watch as she is taken, never too be heard from again – typical. Like an episode taken straight out of a Law and Order: SVU.

Justice has come a long way since her Nickelodeon show Victorious, showing that she can also play a strong female lead and not only a precocious and quirky teenager. She still comes off flat and one dimensional at times, especially struggling when she is forced to deal with a serious scene. Rounding out the cast is the comic relief found in Lindy’s homosexual counterpart, Conner (John Garet Stoker), who has some of the better lines. The writing improves noticeably once he is introduced into the show with the scenes seeming more believable and entertaining.

The idea of a possible serial killer is obsessed with human perfection suggests a commentary on the contemporary ideology that perfection can be achieved in today’s modern society. Which also plays into the whole online dating façade that people display an image of who they want to be but not who they really are. And for that you must be, at least in this show, killed.

If you are looking for a substitute while waiting for Finding Carter or Catfish to come back, Eye Candy is a decent replacement.

Eye Candy airs Monday at 10 pm on MTV.