Telemarketers are, in a general sense, the subject of HBO's scandalous new limited series, which uses one infamous scam by a defunct fundraising organization in New Jersey as a springboard to exploring the fraudulent practices of the whole industry. Yet the title of this three-part documentary could also refer to two telemarketers in particular: a pair of call-center cogs who spent two decades, on and off, looking into their shady employers, and discovering how the swindle to which they were contributing was just the tip of the iceberg. That inside-job angle cannily distinguishes the series from any number of more impersonal exposés. Whether the muckrakers are as interesting as the muck they rake is another matter.
One of the documentarians, Sam Lipman-Stern, was only 14 when he started working for Civic Development Group, spending his days cold calling strangers for donations to police and firefighter organizations. His coworkers were fellow teenagers, ex-convicts, and generally desperate people, all working for minimum wage because the job didn't require a background check. (Also, you could drink and party and peddle your own wares on the clock.) Lipman-Stern has more than his memories of the place to share. His access extends to the hours of footage he shot within the Jersey call center – a treasure trove of home movies that paint CDG as a kind of low-salary Stratton Oakmont, where the drugs and alcohol flowed as freely as the lies callers used to make sales.
The center was plainly a haven for big personalities, some waxing nostalgic in talking-head interviews. (These oddballs, coupled with the grungy, lo-fi chaos of the home-video footage, are presumably what drew executive producers the Safdie brothers and Danny McBride to the project.) Telemarketers finds a main character, in multiple senses of the word, in Patrick Pespas, a loquacious goofball whose addiction to heroin proved no impediment to his ability to talk nearly anyone into donating. "Pat the Tapper," as his coworkers dub him, is smart and cognizant enough to realize that most of the money he's convincing people to give isn't going to where they're claiming it's going. His larger curiosity about that fuels the show's turn towards amateur investigation.
Lipman-Stern, along with cousin/co-director Adam Bhala Lough, understands the sensationalistic appeal of CDG's anything-goes workplace culture. But he also knows the truly shocking thing about the job was how much of a grift it was. Telemarketers, at its most involving, gets into the logistics of preying on the sympathies of strangers while navigating around their excuses. Fundraising for police groups was a particularly lucrative hustle – not just for how it allowed callers to weaponize back-the-blue sentiments in the aftermath of 9/11, but also for how it carried the implied threat of consequences for those who didn't donate. Like any con artists, the businessmen behind CDG got more brazen as they continued to get away with their scheme: Eventually, callers were encouraged to identify themselves as cops, and to lie about how little of the money donated would actually go to the families of fallen officers.
CDG would eventually shutter after the government caught wind of its dirty practices; the biggest telemarketing scam in American history, they called it. But soon, the company reformed under a different name, and plenty more sprung up, too. Episode two is largely devoted to Lipman-Stern and Pespas uncovering the full truth about the fundraising racket. Why has the government failed to regulate or shut down this kind of company? Telemarketers posits that places like CDG are able to keep pocketing much of what they solicit because of their legitimate ties to powerful police unions, who have their own history of misappropriating funds. They're not ripping cops off. They're cutting them in.
The hook of the series, of course, is that all this is being dredged up by a couple of former employees who worked the phones. Pespas frames the search for answers as an attempt to atone for his participation in the system, but there's something faintly self-aggrandizing about this "personal" dimension: "We're standing up for the little guy!" he proudly declares, while giddily agreeing when Lipman-Stern labels him both a journalist and a whistleblower.
Pespas is clearly a thoughtful guy, and it's heartening to see him, over the course of the show's 20-year timeline, get his life together without losing his shaggy, likable spark. But the assumption that his desire to tell this story is every bit as interesting as the story itself is misplaced. Lipman-Stern probably just finds his friend more fascinating than we might, though he's at least capable of recognizing his flaws as an interviewer: "I don't think it ever occurred to me that Pat might suck at this," the director sheepishly confesses.
By episode three, Telemarketers has almost fully transformed into a documentary about guys trying to make a documentary. Michael Moore's name is tellingly invoked no fewer than three times, foreshadowing a number of scenes in which Pespas and Lipman-Stern track down and ambush politicians. There's a tight, incisive 100 minutes of documentary here, but it's been stretched out across three hour-long episodes of television with a little too much navel-gazing in them.
Still, so long as Telemarketers is diving into the seedy realities of the biz, it's engrossing. There's a strong awareness here about how white-collar malfeasance sometimes depends on blue-collar despair; places like CDG built their scams on the hard work of people without other prospects, and even capitalized on their problems. (It's no accident, one interviewee insists, that these companies employ so many people with drug problems – they make good callers!) Maybe Lipman-Stern and Pespas wrapped all this up in their personal journey for the same reason that some telemarketers personalize their pitches: It sells. But their insider insights are a lily that didn't need gilding.
