When a spam call comes in, the voice on the other side is, more often than not, robot-generated. But it still might belong to an actual human, someone who is ringing you from their kitchen table while they pat their dog or scroll through Facebook. Or perhaps they’re at a call center, a boiler room such as the hellhole in Sam Lipman-Stern’s wild and winsome documentary, inspired by his own adventures in the world of telemarketing.
The three-part series Telemarketers, co-produced by a group including Danny McBride and the Safdie brothers, and co-directed by Adam Bhala Lough, comes as a pungent counterpunch to series such as Succession and Billions, which examine American greed through the lens of excess and quiet luxury. It takes a gloriously scuzzy approach to its portrayal of large-scale profiteering, offering a Dickensian portrait of a band of characters who had few options besides clocking in at an outfit that was grooming employees to fleece unsuspecting victims to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.
