User Reviews

Melissa Caddick seems to be a highly successful financial advisor, living a lavish lifestyle, buy supercars and haute couture, but underneath it, she's defrauding her clients, and running a Ponzi scheme, a scam.

I am a little surprised by some of the negative reviews of this series, nobody can claim it's brilliant, but it's certainly watchable enough, it's such a fascinating story.

The authorities must take some degree of blame for this, they appeared to be utterly incompetent, and allowed her to get away with blue murder.

I'm just stunned at how or why none of the investors spotted any of the flaws, such as the six digit account numbers.

I think it's fairly well paced, and I liked the wah the story is told, in the first part we learn what she did, in the following two episodes, we get to learn why.

I really liked Kate Atkinson's performance as Mel, I thought she did a really fine job. Melissa is portrayed as a horrid human being, she lies and cheats freely, someone who's used to getting what she wants.

The Devil wears Dior.

7/10.

Bewildered why they would sell this as Underbelly, the story is/was worthy of making the a movie.

I enjoyed the show in fact hard for me not too with Colin Friels, one of my all time favourite Aussie actors. Also Kate Atkinson, loved her since Sea Change days. Both these two do a good job as usual, unfortunately the casting of them for their respective characters was a poor choice and reflects poorly for them both.

The story and script could have been dramatised to be far more entertaining and the whole thing is messy especially the ending.

Overall worthy of a watch but by no means a gritty underworld story.

6½ rounded up.

Some legendary and iconic Australian actors in this and doing the best they can with a terrible long, boring, corny and forced script. (Apart from the struggling card board stiff female actor playing the ASIC investigator). A doco or show cut down to less than half the time would have helped. Then would have only wasted only half our time watching it. Shame really, as generally speaking, such a such a waste of talented actors.

While I think it's an OK mini series I think it's a giant waste of time because none of it is real or can be confirmed. It's all made up so we are the viewer can get a kick out of what we think happened which is again a giant waste of time !! Should have just done a show based on this and changed details and definitely not related it to underbelly because as most of us guess she is actually alive.....

Really cringe. Interesting enough story but so badly executed it's entertaining. The acting is poor, the script is terrible and just comes off as a low budget NCIS type series. I wouldn't bother watching if you value your time and quality shows. I was just bored and it made me laugh because of how bad it is...

Large parts of this (the entire George sub-plot) are simply made up to drag the story out and try to add a twist - badly acted and badly made. Listen to the Liar, Liar podcast instead -accurate and much, much better.

If you are on the fence about watching this... you should! It's a great show I was interested the whole time. Push through the negative reviews and check it out for yourself!

The same story could have been told in half the time with no loss of coherence and probably making a lot more interesting programme.

As it stands, far too much time spent looking at things, looking out of windows and watching people walk, none of which adds anything to the story or informs us about the characters.

Thinking about it, it's really boring. I thought because it was part of the 'Underbelly' stories it would be tight and gripping showing Australian society from a certain perspective. What I got was a waste of time.

Feels like these 2 episodes were rushed out while the Melissa Caddick story is still topical.

Terrible acting. Script not much better.

No suspense or feeling of drama that must have surrounded such a terrible fraud.

Some odd attempts at humour just added to the amateurish feeling of the whole production.

Man oh man the acting, it's so bad! The main character has been cast incorrectly, and the actress who plays the asic agent. What were they thinking I'm sorry but she's a terrible actress. I feel like I'm watching a high school Drama class production.

Always enjoyed Kate Atkinson in Wentworth so to see her as a crim in an underbelly was something new. She delivers a fantastic performance, but pity some of the others just phoned it in.

Absolutely love the Underbelly series however this story is definitely not worthy to bear its name. Sure the story is worth telling but could have been given a different name.

The actress that plays Phoebe the ASIC officer needs acting lessons. Her performance is so wooden like she read the script and is just repeating the lines. No emotion whatsoever.

The speculation about what happened to Melissa makes for an absolutely terrible ending. Definitely avoid.

Wow this was pretty ordinary. Episode 2 was just a waste of time.. it was all over by episode 1.

The acting was B grade standard. Felt like it was rushed, and recorded over a weekend.

I note the generally poor reviews for this series and think that they are wrong. This is a good series and at only three episodes can hardly be described as too long. Having seen footage of the real Melissa Caddick I was struck by how good Kate Atkinson was at playing Caddick. The story of how an intelligent woman, inspired by the infamous Bernie Madoff, was able to persuade all her family, friends and wealthy people she met to hand over all their money for her to invest seems a bit far fetched, but of course it actually happened. How a woman can rip so many people off, particularly her parents, relatives and her best friend is beyond me, but fortunately few of us have that mindset. As well as being entertaining it also serves as a warning to beware of charismatic sociopaths promising the world. Well worth watching, particularly for Kate Atkinson's performance.

What rubbish. If the series followed the facts it would of been over in one episode. So the writers made up 2 hours of drivel to call it a mini series. Then finished with Telling the viewer it was made up garbage.

Sadly this superficial retelling of the Melissa Caddick story cashes in on the underbelly name with little of the quality that most previous underbelly series have given.

No new information about the situation was given although some aspects of the dramatization did add some emotion to the story.

In truth, the 60 minutes story with the real life characters was somewhat more entertaining and informative.

Poor, Poor attempt to continue the Underbelly saga.

The only thing remotely similar is the theme music, but don't be fooled, this is nothing of the class of Seasons 3 The Golden Mile, 1 Original Series and 2 A Tale of Two Cities. In that order, in my humble opinion.

Can't believe Frankie J Holden, who played Garry Butterworth as leader of VicPol Team Purana in the original series let himself be conned into appearing in this.

Utter rub ish!

Oh my gosh! I abandoned part way into second episode. The main character's acting is so awful. What was that angry/worried expression she constantly wore? Just bad. Do not waste your time .

Putting aside the acting, I can't help but think what poor taste the whole production is when told from the perspective of the missing lady. Guilty of a crime, sure, but given that her ending is still a mystery it is incredibly poor taste to trivialise her life.

Do I want to watch a series about a selfish, lying, stealing b**ch? No. I made it thru the first episode and decided that I simply didn't care what happened to her. Whatever it was, it was too good.

But well done , Kate Atkinson is great in this role , what a telent she is , she can play any role .. underbelly light ? Stil worth watching well done.

Melissa Cadick was a self-styled financial advisor, who swindled her clients out of millions of Australian dollars. She disappeared when the financial authorities started to investigate her; then her shoe, still containing her foot, washed up on a beach. It sounds like it should make a good story; but many con tricks are really very simple, the con artist might tell a sophisticated story of how they're going to make a lot of money, but the actual con is simply to tell the tale and pocket the cash. The mystery associated with her disappearence is effectively solved by the discovery of a body part: it's overwhelmingly likely she jumped off a cliff (and that the rest of her corpse was eaten by sharks). This dramatised account of her life doesn't even offer us insights into how she got away with it for so long: the Melissa we see isn't particuarly clever, or charming, merely pushy. The series tries to keep things interesting by hinting at an alternative narrative, one in which Melissa gets away with it (or at least, does so at the expense of one foot), before effectively conceding that there's no evidence to support such a theory. There's not much to take away other than the message that humans can be greedy; and if you didn't know that already, well, Melissa would have sold you an investment plan in a thrice.