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.
The person doing the filming is high-school dropout turned telemarketer Sam Lipman-Stern, and he’s only really doing it because one of his colleagues thought it would be funny to capture the craziness. But as the years roll on, Lipman-Stern starts to have concerns about what exactly he’s selling. The company that he works for, the ambiguously named Civic Development Group (CDG), are nominally soliciting donations for police unions and charities, but nearly all of the cash raised goes into the pockets of the company, and the methods used to convince the public to separate with their hard-earned are deeply dubious.
As Patrick J Pespas, another employee at CDG and the driving force behind the documentary’s attempts to bring this dodginess to light, puts it: “The business model is defrauding the most vulnerable in this country”. So, over the course of close to two decades Lipman-Stern and Pespas decide to turn whistleblowers and expose CDG’s malfeasance … and end up discovering an industry full of corruption. The result is something like The Cook Report crossed with Jackass – a crusading investigative documentary in a goofy, slacker wrapper.
Lipman-Stern, who after his stint at CDG went on to work for Vice’s documentary team, might be Telemarketers’ narrator and director, but Pespas is undoubtedly its star, and one of those great “characters” that the best documentaries stumble upon (think Mike Schank from American Movie, who Pespas bears more than a passing resemblance to). An ex-con (like many of the employees at CDG) with addiction issues, he spends much of the early part of the series in a state of disarray – one scene captures him attempting a call while barely conscious, having just snorted heroin in the office bathroom (remarkably he manages to complete a sale). But Pespas also has an innate concern for the little man, and an absolute fearlessness in the face of authority, willing to confront everyone from senators to powerful police chiefs. It barely seems to matter that, as Lipman-Stern puts it, Pespas often “sucks” at the nuts and bolts of investigative journalism.
Telemarketers’ “documentary by accident” approach is perhaps its trump card. Lipman-Stern and Pespas are willing to take risks that others, with more to lose, might not. For the pair it’s a crusade that has bookended their adult lives, and it’s affecting to see their faces change as months become years, then decades, but the rapport between them remains unchanged. Theirs is a remarkable journey to witness, from low-stakes office hijinks to breathless pursuits down the corridors of power. How successful they are in their quest is up for debate, but it’s a great ride, for them and us, regardless.
There’s a slightly concerning postscript to Telemarketers: at the time of writing Pespas is now missing, with Lipman-Stern, co-director Adam Bhala Lough and Pespas’s family putting out calls on social media for information on his whereabouts. Let’s hope he’s found soon: accidental have-a-go heroes like him don’t come around too often.
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