With a few notable exceptions (hello, Boiling Point), decent TV has been a little thin on the ground in these early weeks of autumn. So the arrival of a good new show should be something to be raving about from the rooftops. It’s all the weirder then that there’s been so little buzz around HBO’s three-part documentary Telemarketers, which slunk quietly on to Now last month in the UK (US readers: you can watch it on Max; Australian readers: it’s on Binge). A shame because Telemarketers is one of the most memorable documentaries I’ve seen in a while.
If you were to boil Telemarketers down to a straight one-sentence synopsis, you’d probably describe it as “an investigative documentary about call centre scams”. Which might bring to mind the daytime TV service journalism of BBC’s Scam Interceptors. The clue that Telemarketers is something altogether wilder is in its list of executive producers, which includes the Safdie Brothers (of Uncut Gems fame) and Danny McBride (Eastbound & Down, The Righteous Gemstones). The involvement of that unlikely group makes a lot more sense after the first few minutes of Telemarketers’ first episode, made up of grainy, grubby camcorder footage of a New Jersey call centre in the early 2000s, and the aberrant behaviour within: computer equipment being hurled across the office; hard drugs being snorted; boozy all-nighters in the break room; pitbull puppies and a miniature turtle roaming around the office.
