Imagine this: It’s September 2015. You were walking on a deserted dirt road, and you fell into a well. Your phone is broken. No one can find you. Death beckons. Fortunately, fresh water supplies and a dry rock ledge to sleep in. You find moss and algae lining the well shafts that are edible. Sometimes, you even catch a lizard. You exist for seven long years. Finally, you have been rescued! After receiving medical care, bathing, reuniting with loved ones, and so on, you decide to watch television. What is “Peacock”? ” you asked, looking at a screen cramped with strange apps. “Is HBO Max like HBO Go? How does the Discovery channel have enough programming for the entire streaming service? “Everybody tells you to relax and pick a show. So you choose Hulu’s new limited series Dropout.
You only vaguely remember Theranos—Is it related to blood? —And the young, blond founder, Elizabeth Holmes, from magazine covers in your pre-healthy days. You watch Amanda Seyfried, her eyes wide, her voice low, her hair messy, criminal, as she transforms from a sassy but devoted Stanford freshman into a wildly successful con artist. brilliant, unscrupulous retail of medical supplies to unsuspecting Americans. You are infatuated. Acting is splash. The plot is thrilling. Your mind is confused by how Theranos unravels. After you finish Dropout, you post on Facebook, telling the world about the amazing show you just watched. Almost no one responds — people don’t check Facebook anymore? —But your aunt writes: “Eh. I listened to podcasts. And watched documentaries. And read the book”.
Book? Documentary? Podcasts? You’ll soon discover that any story that’s significant in 2022 is significant as many times as possible, in as many mediums as possible. Before watching Dropouteveryone can read Bad blood, the nonfiction book by reporter John Carreyrou chronicling the downfall of Theranos. Or they can listen to the Holmes podcast, also titled Dropout. Or they can watch HBO documentaries Inventor. And this is not the end of Theranos content. There’s a feature film in production with Jennifer Lawrence and an upcoming archive from The real world conveyor belt Bunim / Murray Productions.
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Why make a series about a story everyone already knows? You’re perplexed, but you soon stumble across another discovery: Most of the stories that seem substantial these days are a sub-branch of real crime that focuses on scammers. Outside Dropoutyou see Shonda Rhimes’ Invented Anna on Netflix, about a sly Russian girl who calls herself Anna Delvey as she ventures into New York’s goofy art scene. Invented Anna adapted from a New York journal articles; had one Vanity Fair fragments and memoirs of Delvey’s prison escapes published by a writer she conned. Then there’s the BBC podcast “The Fake Heir.” On HBO Max, the document store Generation hustlediscover 10 different modern scammers, also there’s an episode of Anna Delvey.
Documentaries about scammers are very popular these days. Netflix has The Tinder Swindlera documentary about an Israeli man who cheated on several Scandinavian women out of small fortunes, and The Puppet Master: Hunting the Ultimate Conman is about an English man who basically kidnaps college kids and a single mother by posing as a spy. The platform has also just been released Worst roommate everan anthology featuring rogue roommates based on New York journal articles. Amazon Prime has LulaRich, a repository of documents on the LulaRoe multi-level marketing plan. If you’ve somehow run out of recent scam content, the 2019 duel documentary about incompetent party promoter Billy McFarland’s Fyre Festival, titled Fyre and Fyre Cheatingrespectively, are still available on Hulu and Netflix.
And much more than that. Netflix is releasing a documentary about a scammer called Bad vegans at the end of this month. When a lousy rap entrepreneur named Heather Morgan was arrested along with her boyfriend earlier this year in connection with laundering billions of dollars in Bitcoin, Hollywood announced three separate projects within a week of the arrest of the instantly famous “Cryptocurrency Couple”. As the crypto market continues to expand, there are bound to be more outrage stories of blockchain scammers being collected and dumped into the crime-news-fraud-TV pipeline.
Scam stories have flourished during a period of larger real-crime booms, and like real crime, they’re often extracted from headlines, dependent on the intellectual property that’s been around since. prior to. If they are plays, they usually have stuntmen. In the case of both Invented Anna and Dropout, they give the host the chance to play a narcissist with a unique way of talking and especially bad hair. (This trend will continue with Apple productsg WeCrashin which Jared Leto plays WeWork CEO Adam Neumann with his shoulder-length haircut and Israeli accent, as well as Article about Pam, an NBC limited series starring the elusive Renée Zellweger as a Midwestern conspirator. Both shows are based on other accounts of real-life events.) And their stories involve a long-winded ups and downs: Watch that person fool everyone, until suddenly however they don’t.
True crime stories are all the more appealing because of the negative comfort they give audiences as well as the indirect thrills they bring. If you’re tracking crime, you can’t be a victim of it either. Thus, treating crime as entertainment can feel like a backup against disaster. In a similar way, our craving for scam stories reflects our culture’s anxiety about being our own spot. In these bad times, the prevalence of stories examining how scams happen gives us the opportunity to observe hoaxes in progress from a safe distance.
With so many streaming services jostling through so much content, relying on this kind of story makes business sense. Like a movie about a heist or a movie about a killer, scam stories are a known quantity and because they are based on projects that have been successful in other formats, they are a twice the amount known. But the enthusiastic reception of these compelling stories has led to an oversaturation that leaves newcomers to the Canon Scam Show hard to avoid feeling stagnant. Even Dropout, by far the most accomplished new product, dazzled by this overwhelming familiarity. At some point, choosing to spend our limited time in this world watching the same story over and over raises a question: Who exactly is being ripped off here?
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