Look, we all know that you don’t necessarily have to have a likable protagonist, but a series about telemarketers might be pushing it more than a little. Luckily this new series isn’t a drama, but a crime documentary. Interested? The three-part Telemarketers has arrived in Australia, and is now streaming exclusively on BINGE.
Produced by Josh and Benny Safdie (Uncut Gems), Danny McBride (Halloween), and David Gordon Green (again, Halloween), and directed by Adam Bhala Lough and Sam Lipman-Stern, Telemarketers, as the official synopsis clues us in, “chronicles the 20-year journey of two unlikely employees who stumble upon the murky truth behind a seedy New Jersey call centre. With raw eyewitness footage and a comedic cast of characters, this three-part documentary takes you from an anarchic boiler room filled with booze, drugs, and debauchery to the halls of the United States Senate as a billion-dollar telemarketing scam unravels.”
One of those “unlikely employees” is co-director Sam Lipman-Stern, who took a job in a call centre as a 14-year-old high school dropout and began shooting video at work for his own amusement before becoming appalled at the morally bankrupt practices of a business that solicited charitable donations but funnelled them into private profit. The other is his call centre mentor, Pat Pespas, a gregarious, heroin-addicted veteran of the industry, who comes across as a cross between a Kevin Smith character and a Zen monk. Cometh the hour, cometh the man, we guess. When Woodward and Bernstein are unavailable, you take what you can get.
Sure, we all think telemarketers and chuggers (that’s “charity muggers”) are annoying as hell, but exactly how vile the industry is has been largely kept under wraps. With Lipman-Stern and Pespas on point, Telemarketers promises to be a fascinating and no doubt enraging deep dive into one of the most aggravating, ubiquitous, and venal phenomena of the modern age.
