Scams make great true-crime TV
Documentaries focus on Billy McFarland, others.
Forget murder. Forget unsolved mysteries. Forget 1990s tabloid crime. The next wave in true-crime TV is here, and it might just be trying to pull one over on you.
From a too-good-to-be-true music festival to a suspect blood-testing miracle to bad boyfriends and bad mothers, the past few months have seen a new trend in both documentary series and fictionalized true-crime adaptations: the art of the scam. And in 2019, when political scams and “fake news” are near-daily headlines, the moment couldn’t be better.
The wave began last year with Bravo’s “Dirty John,” based on the Los Angeles Times podcast about a violent con man who swindled a woman he met online. But it truly took off in in January, when Netflix and Hulu released dueling documentaries about the infamous Fyre Festival, the would-be 2017 luxury music festival, in the same week.
The trend shows no signs of slowing down. On March 18, HBO will air “The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley,” a documentary from director Alex Gibney (“Going Clear”), about Elizabeth Holmes, the Silicon Valley CEO who raised millions for her company, Theranos, by falsely claiming to reinvent blood testing.
That week, Hulu releases “The Act,” a fictionalized retelling of the story of Dee Dee Blanchard and Gypsy Rose Blanchard, a case of faked illness and murder. One of the many projects Shonda Rhimes is pursuing for Netflix is an untitled series about Anna Delvey, a young woman who scammed New York’s socialite scene into believing she was one of their own.
“We all like people who overpromise and overachieve,” Gibney said in February when asked about the obsession with fraudsters. “So the grandeur of these visions is compelling to us, which is why I think we’re all invested in them. But we’re also interested in when people take us in, and then lie to us, and then fail, and then I think we’re happy that they fall.”
It’s easy to be happy that Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland was jailed for defrauding customers and investors and stiffing laborers who worked on his doomed music festival, or that Theranos collapsed before its shoddy blood testing could wreak havoc on people’s health. Stories of fraud give way to simple, black and white morality tales with obvious villains and heroes, the whistleblowers who bring them down. The stakes are high enough to be intriguing, but not often a matter of life and death.
“The Inventor” is so wild and outrageous it might as well be the backstory for a comic-book villain. Holmes seems more a cartoon character than a person, with her Steve Jobs-inspired black turtlenecks and unnerving smile. The film paints her as a near-sociopathic liar, peddling her faulty “Edison” blood testing machines, no matter the cost.
The film seems gleeful in its unraveling of Holmes’ story, targeting the rich and powerful investors and media figures she duped. (In Silicon Valley, ideas are seemingly more important than skill.) The documentary has all the riveting twists and turns of a murder case, but it’s also genuinely fun, because the death and destruction Theranos could have caused was mostly deferred.
If “The Inventor” is gleeful, “Fyre Fraud” and “Fyre” are downright giddy, each capitalizing on the wave of schadenfreude that hit social media after the news of the failed Fyre Festival originally broke in 2017. Promoted on social media as an exclusive music event on a private island in the Bahamas once owned by notorious drug lord Pablo Escobar, the festival was a complete dud. Music acts pulled out, construction wasn’t complete and the promised luxury accommodations were actually tents for hurricane victims, soaked by rain.
Both documentaries revel in poking fun at the rich kids eating soggy cheese sandwiches, but it’s Hulu’s “Fraud” that succeeds in telling a deeper, more nuanced story about how we were all so easily duped by McFarland’s promises. The Netflix film is partly its own scam: It was produced by Jerry Media, a company that provided marketing services to Fyre Festival and casts itself as a victim in the fiasco.
“Dirty John” and “The Act” are more personal and tragic stories that involve abuse and death, but their villains are no less odious and their stories no less outrageous, even if the treatments are fictionalized. Both stories ended in the abuser’s death, rather than the victims’.
Stories of scam and fraud aren’t new to pop culture. Films and television have relished in the narrative opportunities of liars and cheats for years, from “Catch Me if You Can” to “The Mentalist.” But the true stories are far juicier. None of us who view these series will think that we can be tricked. We’re all too clever and too careful. We’re far smarter than those Instagram idiots who bought tickets to Fyre and the Walgreens executives who put Theranos machines in their stores. These TV shows give us the opportunity to feel superior.
But the truth is, we probably can be tricked. It’s happened before. It will happen again. And then, likely, someone will be there with a camera to tell us how.