With hundreds of millions of records sold, careers that are still thriving in their fourth decade, and admiration from the likes of Taylor Swift, the boy bands the Backstreet Boys and ‘NSync are absolute pop royalty. They were also the creations of one of America’s biggest criminals. It’s this bizarre duality that Netflix’s new docuseries Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam explores with energy and style.
This is the strange, extremely American story of Lou Pearlman, who got the startup money for his boy band empire by crashing his own blimps, and who eventually built a fortune by masterminding what is widely believed to be the longest-running Ponzi scheme in US history. Dirty Pop masterfully captures the many facets of a man who seemed genuinely delighted to be a part of the bands he lovingly put together, even while acting as the casting director of his own reality, putting the con on everyone from his secretary to powerful politicians and bankers.
It begins with a daydream – while assisting New Kids on the Block with an airliner lease, Pearlman is reported to have exclaimed, “I’m in the wrong line of business!” once he learned of the staggering revenues generated by the band. From there he went on a talent search, eventually putting together the group that would become the Backstreet Boys. Once that group reached the heights of pop stardom, he very cannily reasoned that someone would eventually create the Pepsi to his Coke, so why not do it himself – thus ‘NSync became his next big project. A dizzying array of others would follow, including the chart-topping bands O-Town and LFO, Hulk Hogan’s daughter Brooke, and the tween idol Aaron Carter.
Yet there was a dark side to the success – all but two of Pearlman’s bands and solo acts ended up suing him, all of these lawsuits resulting in either court losses or settlements. Pearlman also eventually faced criminal charges for conspiracy, money laundering and filing false bankruptcy, being sentenced to 25 years in jail, an almost unheard of sentence for white-collar crimes.
Dirty Pop’s deep dive into the complicated reality of bands who owed much of their incredible success to the very genuine relationships they developed with Pearlman, yet who eventually came to see him as a Judas, comes together in the voice of Michael Johnson. A drummer in Pearlman boy band Natural, Johnson ends up becoming a close confidant of the conman, only to later revolt as Pearlman’s facade begins to wither away. (Johnson also serves as an executive producer on Dirty Pop.)
“He’s one of the most complex characters that I’ve ever heard of,” Johnson said in a video interview. “The person who caused the death of one of his best friends and stole people’s entire life savings, he also lent me his – or whomever’s – private jet to fly to my grandfather’s funeral, and was there for me when my girlfriend broke up with me. Everything about him was genius, but he applied it in really different ways.”
Johnson’s tracing of Pearlman’s arc from father figure to betrayer gives the series a very necessary and potent emotional core, the drummer’s heartfelt testimony driving home the human cost of the mogul’s deceit. “I had a front row seat to that weaponization of that greed, power and fame,” he told me, “how Lou was able to exploit everyone’s dreams. The people I started meeting and caring about in 1998, who never recovered from Lou’s crimes. That effect still really weighs on me.”
Pearlman’s story has been told before in various forms, and one thing that distinguishes Dirty Pop is the level of archival research that went into the project. The creators of the series have unearthed a treasure trove of “before they were stars” footage that adds a level of fun and 90s nostalgia – this is, after all, as much a story of what the 90s sounded like as it is the tale of a classic American con artist. “Digging through the archives, we had a thrill almost weekly,” said Johnson. “We’d constantly be talking to each other, saying, ‘Oh my God, did you see that!?’”
Dirty Pop also successfully tells the story from multiple sides, granting some insight into how a man like Pearlman could operate and what made him tick. This proves fascinating, especially when these worlds often merge. “There’s this moment when Lou and the Backstreet Boys are singing the Commodores’ Easy at the piano,” said Lance Nichols, an executive producer of the show. “It’s like this guy is running a Ponzi scheme and somehow he’s easy like Sunday morning at the piano with these kids. It’s just surreal to me.”
One of the most interesting choices of the docuseries is to essentially deepfake Pearlman by using AI technology to put words from his autobiography, Bands, Brands and Billions, into promo footage of him speaking from home office. “He’s absolutely so unencumbered and full of it in his book, we wanted to include it in some way,” David Fine, a director of the show, said. “This idea arose as do so many good ideas as a passing aside. Michael was like, ‘maybe we just deepfake him,’ and something kind of clicked. I was like, ‘well he was a deep fake,’ I mean he faked so many people out. So I think formally the choice is very rooted in character.”
These AI-rendered pieces of Pearlman offer a kind of counterpoint throughout the show, giving a side that feels less performative, and more intimately directed at the viewer, than the public-facing persona. “The words in his book show the reality that he was living in, and for us to go back and check in with Lou’s reality throughout the series was very important,” said Johnson. “Here’s this guy who, maybe he’ll lure you to sleep, maybe you’ll come to believe him,” said Johnson. “It’s like, if he offers you a deal, would you take it?”
Wary of the ethics of deepfaking Pearlman, the team brought on a consultant from the MIT Open Documentary Lab and tried to make use of the technology in a responsible manner. “As people who do unscripted nonfiction, I think this is a tool that we can use, if it’s done ethically,” said Nichols. “This is probably a question we’re all going to be dealing with for the rest of our lives. This technology … it’s not going back.”
Dirty Pop offers some opportunity to reflect on the kinds of people the celebrity culture enables, and makes one wonder if the next Pearlman isn’t already out there choreographing the rise of the next big pop act. One imagines there will be many more chances to tell this story. “This is a very American tale – you don’t hear of Ponzi schemes in that many other places,” said Johnson. “People are able to feed on the rat race of capitalism, and proximity to celebrity and power is one of the easiest ways to manipulate people. Lou had a way of using these people flawlessly. They would have done anything for him because they wanted to feel cool. He made them feel like they were cool.”
Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam is now available on Netflix
