Back in September, Netflix announced a long-term plan to fill half of its catalogue with original programming. This perhaps explains its feverish efforts in recent years to make big-budget versions of every TV format under the sun – with the possible exceptions of home shopping and crime scene re-enactment. However, the latter arrives on the platform on Friday courtesy of Captive, a slick docuseries that does for a string of high-stakes false imprisonments what Crimewatch does for armed robberies in Penge.

Across eight episodes, the show revisits hostage-takings in eight countries from Brazil to Chechnya to Yemen, using first-hand interviews, archival footage and glossy reconstructions to piece together precise accounts of events often shrouded in confusion and terror. At first, it’s not clear what Captive hopes to achieve beyond raising the audience’s collective heart rate but, over time, a few factors begin to elevate the show beyond its superficial sales pitch as a sleek but repetitive odyssey through the “List of hostage crises” Wikipedia entry.

Most remarkably, episodes regularly secure the participation of both victims and perpetrators, granting the audience a more nuanced understanding of events by allowing them to observe from two angles. In one episode detailing a 1993 Ohio prison riot in which 450 inmates turned the tables on their guards, a prisoner recalls how he located and studied the jail’s hostage negotiation manual, allowing him to work to the same handbook as police in the subsequent stand-off.

Captive allows these subjects to speak for themselves, rather than prodding them for details. It’s an approach that creates empathy with victims, but often provokes swaggering bravado in their captors, meaning little is revealed about the latter group. “Snitches get ditches,” says one Ohio inmate, now released and wearing a trilby, in a moment the show plays for edgy menace. If there’s more to his words than macho posturing, Captive isn’t interested in finding out.

Likewise, the show’s desire to both ratchet tension and probe for meaning often leaves it scrambling for cod philosophy in its closing minutes. Several episodes end with victims considering the humanity they share with their tormentors, a lofty idea unearned by a show more interested in milking hostage situations for their innate horror. This contradiction is nothing new: it’s inherent in every unsparing Crimewatch dramatisation of a Northampton pensioner’s murder that claims a higher moral calling. Maybe this is one TV format even Netflix can’t salvage.