JP Pomare’s thriller novel The Last Guests is a bit of a potboiler, but it is well-paced and unpredictable – barrelling through a twisty storyline about a married couple who rent out their lake house on an Airbnb-like platform. The juiciest element is a lurid subplot about a network of voyeurs watching live streams from covertly installed cameras. A lot of this simmers in the background, but snippets of this shady society are strewn throughout, coming to the fore in dramatic narrative flashpoints.
The book’s television adaptation, Watching You, minimises this element, effectively removing the society of voyeurs in favour of a more traditional villain and a smaller scale. It’s a weird decision; imagine if the film adaptation of Sliver had removed most of the book’s famous “peeping Tom” elements. Those who haven’t read The Last Guests won’t know what they’ve missed out on, of course, but those like me who have may wonder what on earth the show’s creators/writers (Alexei Mizin and Ryan van Dijk) were thinking. We want our sick, salacious voyeurs!
