"The Ashley Madison Affair" contains the familiar ingredients of your standard true crime documentary. It has sympathetic victims agreeing to appear on camera, mainly women who discovered their husbands were cheating on them. One, however, is an average guy swinger parted from his cash by "fembots."
It has a convenient scoundrel in the company's former CEO Noel Biderman, an evangelist for adultery who styled himself as the face of Ashley Madison, index finger pressed to shushed lips.
It has unconventional assailants some may consider to be digital vigilantes for justice: a hacker group called the Impact Team. Its 2015 breach of the databases belonging to Ashley Madison's parent company Avid Life Media (ALM) leaked sensitive personal information associated with tens of millions of accounts onto the dark web, including thousands connected to the U.S. government and military email addresses.
That crime inspired the title and is an as-yet unsolved mystery – another viewer enticement – since the Impact Team remains at large.
The four-part ABC News documentary series has something else working in its favor, in that it reinforces the media and consumers' roles as accessories to its subject's messiness. Not in any criminal respect, but maybe in a moral sense. We watched as Ashley Madison's tasteless commercials became a late-night TV staple only a few years after its 2002 founding. Eyebrows arched at its provocative billboards featuring politicians caught with their pants down with people other than their spouses. Those same ads would be featured on newscasts, granting the company additional exposure and cultural legitimacy.
Many of us chortled when the 2015 hack exposed customer names and addresses, emails and more. Helping that along was Josh Duggar's unmasking as the infidelity site's poster boy; two months before it happened, the reality star was revealed to have molested five young girls as a teenager, including four of his sisters.
And that came before the world found out that Josh Duggar was also soliciting child pornography, a crime for which he was sentenced to 12 years in prison in December 2021. This is all familiar trivia to anyone who watched Prime Video's "Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets."
"The Ashley Madison Affair" reinforces the media and consumers' roles as an accessories to its subject's messiness.
Is there such a thing as passively participatory true crime entertainment, where viewers don't play armchair detective but somehow and without meaning to abet the wrongdoing being examined?
The unspoken laws of media clusters flimsily dictate that three makes a trend, but the premieres of two thematically disparate but culturally related shows within weeks of each other make a person wonder. Neither "The Ashley Madison Affair" nor "Shiny Happy People" would be possible if we didn't make the entities at the center of them famous.
TLC may have given the Duggars a platform with "19 Kids and Counting" and its spinoff "Counting On," but viewers made the show a hit and its family a paragon of good values. Daytime talk shows like "The View" brought on Biderman to defend the service his company provides in front of booing studio audiences, and thereby increased sales with each appearance he made.
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Some of this can't help but come across as puritanical tsk-tsking since, as the people who were either interviewed or whose words are dramatized by actors point out, the hookups facilitated by Ashley Madison, and its ALM siblings Cougar Life and Established Men were and are consensual.
"We're offering something that's needed, wanted, and desired," offers the company's Chief Strategy Officer Paul Keable in the last episode.
But not always real, the series explains. Part of the Impact Team's goal was to expose ALM's prolific bot use to get their male users to spend money by pursuing potential assignations with manufactured profiles.
Similarly, nobody forced millions of people to watch "19 Kids and Counting" or made tabloid editorial departments cover the Duggars.
But how we felt or feel about the hearts of "The Ashley Madison Affair" and "Shiny Happy People" matters less than what these docuseries tell us about what their main subjects wrought, and the ways the media ecosystem made viewers complicit.
These series stand apart from, say, the usual multipart dives into a chilling homicide case or the mind of an erratic leader whose accompanying cults of personality enabled them to get away with wrongdoing on a grand scale.
Such shows cater to our dark fascination with monstrosity or theatrical shamelessness. The crimes and transgressions are actual, but the extremity allows us to turn everyone involved into unreal figures. We can observe at a remove the Carl Lentzes ("The Secrets of Hillsong") and Joe Exotics ("Tiger King") of the world as sideshow creatures who were somebody else's problem.
In contrast "The Ashley Madison Affair" and "Shiny Happy People" – and, to go further back in time, 2022's "White Hot: The Rise & Fall of Abercrombie & Fitch" and TNT's installment of its "Rich and Shameless" anthology "Girls Gone Wild Exposed" – subconsciously ask us to consider whatever part we may have played in the mainstreaming of something repugnant. The shock value, insofar as there is any, doesn't rest in mere gruesomeness but mass indifference. If there weren't a marketplace for that exclusionary clothing brand's intentionally cultivated image of thin whiteness or convicted "Girls Gone Wild" founder Joe Francis' filmed exploitation of drunk young women, those companies would not have been as lucrative as they were in their heydays.
Regarding Ashley Madison the repugnance refers to the fallout from the hack, not the site's merchandising of adultery. The Impact Team's info dump exposed millions of regular people to scam artists and blackmailers and created an entire related industry of sites devoted to determining whether a person had an account on Ashley Madison, leading to countless divorces and several suicides, one recounted by a Scandinavian journalist interviewed for the docuseries.
The shock value, insofar as there is any, doesn't rest in mere gruesomeness but mass indifference.
One of the men exposed as a cheater was Biderman himself, contradicting his widely broadcast claims of fidelity to his wife Amanda.
"Shiny Happy People" exposes the ways that TLC's family values-branded superstars covered up abuse and carried the banner for a conservative Christian Organization, the Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP). Some IBLP adherents are now influential voices on the far-right political stage and hold public office. We may never know if it would have made such inroads into our political system if the Duggars and their message never became synonymous with "wholesome" family TV.
We do know that "The Ashley Madison Affair" concludes with a happy ending for the company that even makes ABC's Sunny Hostin grimly chuckle. The site, which never stopped running through the hack, is now more popular than ever, boasting around 75 million members worldwide. They say cheaters never win, but a whole lot of them seem to accept that getting found out is better than never taking that chance with their private information. And if they're OK with that, why shouldn't we be?
"The Ashley Madison Affair" is currently streaming on Hulu.
