After years and years of on-and-off, very amateur filming, Pat goes missing - presumed dead or in jail - and the documentary is stalled. Until, and this is where my earlier assumption wasn’t entirely off-base, Sam discovers a family connection to the film industry, Adam Bhala Lough - the film’s other director - who gets The Righteous Gemstones’ Danny McBride’s production company on board, along with film-makers the Safdie brothers as executive producers. It’s resurrected.
What really gives Telemarketers heart is the return of Pat - now a born-again Christian. He’s as toothless and unstable as ever, but with a reinvigorated commitment to taking down the corrupt industry that is scamming millions of the most vulnerable Americans out of their hard-earned dollars. And it’s working. Just this week, in response to the series, Senator Richard Blumenthal vowed to take action. Certainly neither Sam nor Pat could’ve made this documentary on their own. But without them, there is nothing. These two drugged-up dropouts, written off by society, have made something pretty great.
HE SAW
When you finish this three-part documentary, you’ll want and need to take a long, hot shower with a wire brush and a range of caustic cleaning products. This is the very definition of underbelly. Almost everyone in this documentary is grimy, living in squalor, skulking around the margins of life, trying to get a cut of something they haven’t earned, trying to game the system, trying to get away with something.
The show features a wide range of criminals from drug addicts and dealers to crooked cops, murderers and the show’s centrepiece: the scammers who have built empires around misleading people in order to build enormous mansions with cellars full of overpriced wine, and ludicrously large collections of guitars which they use mostly to play unlistenable Christian rock.
Nobody comes off looking great - and that includes the series’ protagonists, who worked in the belly of the telemarketing beast prior to becoming whistleblowers.
In one particularly awkward scene, the series’ hero, the loveable Patrick J. Pespas, tries to portray himself as a struggler who’s been exploited by fat cats, but instead of sympathy, he’s met with a brutal slap-down from a government regulator who makes clear that he sees Pespas as just as complicit as anyone.
At least Pespas is now trying to do something good. Many of the people in this documentary are so irredeemably bad as to be laughable. If preternaturally gifted telemarketer, convicted murderer and crazy-eyed psychopath Tommy Bailiff is not currently in discussions for his own reality television show, that’s presumably because no producer has been prepared to risk an in-person meeting. The scenes in which Bailiff wishes death and dismemberment on people who have just refused to give him money are among some of the most compelling not just in this series, but in the history of documentary film.
Who else is bad? The cops, the cops’ unions, politicians who can’t be bothered doing anything to fix the broken system, the people who allowed this system to emerge in the first place, and possibly us, for finding all this entertaining.
The series’ only real hero is not a person at all, but an institution: journalism. Since the documentary first appeared on streaming services only a few days ago, we have seen the promise of serious change to the telemarketing industry for the first time in the many, many years that the poor and vulnerable have been misled into giving their money to the rich and musically illiterate.
Lawmakers and other powerful people have known for years about the dark goings-on in the world of telemarketing. There’s no mystery as to why it’s only now that they’re taking serious action to change it. Once again, journalism has brought a story of darkness into the light and, in doing so, has changed the world for the better.
All three parts of Telemarketers are streaming now on Neon.
