I expect the title of the new HBO documentary mini-series Telemarketers may limit its audience. Not that the title is inaccurate. This is a documentary about the telemarketing industry over the past 25 years or so. But there likely aren’t that many people out there yearning for a deep dive into sleazy scams from the late landline era, which is what the title suggests. Certainly, I wasn’t interested until somebody on social media recommended it with a description suggesting the show was significantly more than I imagined it to be.
That turned out to be true. Telemarketers is a remarkably gripping, frequently surprising, sometimes depressing, but overall heartwarming tale. Yes, I just described something called Telemarketers as heartwarming!
To delve into the nature of that warm heart, I will have to go into some detail, and though I am averse to the culture of spoiler warnings, I do want to note that some of the fun of Telemarketers is its narrative twists and turns. The twists and turns are not mindblowing in the way of, for instance, Netflix’s great Don’t F**k with Cats, but they are pleasurable. Going in to Telemarketers without knowing much at all about it is one way to find the show rewarding. So you might want to consider whether to keep reading if you haven’t watched it already.
Despite its title, Telemarketers overall is not quite a story of an industry but rather of something smaller and more imporant: it is a story of a two-decade friendship between a couple of guys who aren’t exactly model citizens or geniuses, but who nonetheless are easy to root for. While Telemarketers does good work showing the endless criminality of the telemarketing world, its most joyful subversion of expectations is in how it celebrates the humanity of ex-cons and drug addicts against the amoral, exploitative greed of the business owners, the fratboy fascism of the police, and the venal slickness of politicians.
One of the guys, Sam Lipman-Stern, is co-creator of the show (with his cousin Adam Bhala Lough); he met his friend Pat Pespas when they both worked in New Jersey for one of the most repulsive and successful telemarketing firms, Civic Development Group. Lipman-Stern was a 14-year-old high school dropout who liked screwing around with his meathead friends and smoking pot. Pespas was one of the most effective callers in the world of telemarketing and also a gregarious drug addict. Both worked in his favor with CDG. The managers and owners of places like CDG explicitly believed that drug addicts were the best telemarketers because their addiction led them to hone their skills of manipulation. It also made them less likely to be whistleblowers; the company turned a blind eye to whatever illegal things they did at work, so had little fear that the employees would be likely to ask about the legality of the work itself.
Pespas, though, has a real sense of justice. He doesn’t like working for what is obviously a scam, even though he’s phenomenally good at it. But, like most of the other workers at CDG, he didn’t have many other options. With a criminal record in the United States, finding any employment is difficult. Despite the fact that we like to lock up more of our citizens than any other country does, we are also absolutely awful to people who have done time.
Even when he was a teenager, Lipman-Stern wanted to be a documentary filmmaker. He realized what a nutty environment he’d landed in at CDG and started bringing his camera to work. This provides the raw material for the first episode of Telemarketers and is core to part of what is most remarkable about the show. Having started so young, Lipman-Stern documents his co-workers, and particularly Pespas, across many years. The documentary’s own evolution is one of its subjects. Lipman-Stern and Pespas realized the value of their insider footage, and soon began thinking of themselves as the Michael Moores of telemarketing. They were full of passion and righteousness, but they were complete amateurs, and so — to its benefit, really — Telemarketers often feels less like Roger and Me than like American Movie. Their sheer naivety carries them forward. When, after an interview with someone who has real expertise in the field of scam philanthropies, Lipman-Stern says of Pepsas, “It never occurred to me that he might not be any good at this,” we feel his concern. Pepsas has none of the social polish of the middle and upper class, none of the professional skill of a journalist, and it’s easy to worry that his interviews might come to resemble Between Two Ferns — and they kind of do … but the thing is, he’s right. About pretty much everything. He knows the world of telemarketing inside-out, he knows what a scam it is, he knows the workers are being horribly exploited and the victims of the scam are some of the most vulnerable people in the country. He cares, and he cares in a way that people numbed by the corruptions of bureaucracy haven’t been able to care in a long time.
By the time, toward the end of the series, that Pepsas is able to talk with a U.S. Senator, I no longer cringed because of his lack of savoir faire but because of his earnest belief that evidence of corruption will inspire people with power to act. Here, Telemarketers does become like Roger & Me, which we may forget ended with failure. Michael Moore got in front of Roger Smith, CEO of General Motors, and pleaded for Flint, Michigan, but it achieved nothing. Smith didn’t care about Flint, didn’t care about Moore, didn’t care about anything other than staying rich and powerful. Nowadays, Flint is famous for its poisoned water.
One of the things Telemarketers shows is the extent to which police corruption is tolerated and enabled. The worst villains of Telemarketers aren’t the monsters who own the telemarketing companies — those guys are just playing capitalism by its own rules. Their mansions are built from the suffering of the masses, but what mansions aren’t? The worst villains are the people who could have done something and instead chose to either aid the exploitation and corruption or to turn away from it and pretend to be powerless. The worst of these villains are the various Fraternal Order of Police locals that feast with the fiends. Not only do they encourage the worst offenses, they also operate with impunity because people like Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) hear about the evidence linking the FOP to the telemarketing firms and suddenly have to run to another meeting. The moment when Pepsas, waiting for Blumenthal, sees the framed police insignia on the wall of Blumenthal’s office, could have been scored like a jump scare in a horror movie. Pepsas knows in that moment that his quest is doomed. The most powerful politicians in the country are cowed by the police unions and beholden to political action committees (the new grift of the telemarketers). Even cops who lose their jobs because of blatant corruption don’t get punished — instead, they start their own fundraising organizations, using their police contacts and status to further steal from the public and shake down unwitting businesspeople in the name of helping the families of fallen officers (who will never see the money). Poor and elderly people “donate” money they can’t spare to ultimately provide dirty cops with luxury vacations fit for a Supreme Court justice.
The earnestness of Sam Lipman-Stern and especially Pat Pespas is moving. They truly believe, for a while at least, in the possibilities of American justice and goodness. They struggle to understand why revealing obvious corruption does not lead to punishment for that obvious corruption. But revealing corruption is never enough. There must also be some form of power to oppose the corruption. Lipman-Stern and Pespas may have determination and knowledge and righteousness and movie cameras, but they don’t have power.
The end of Telemarketers is not as depressing as it could be, however. Yes, Pepsas and Lipman-Stern fail in their quest. Unless we’re completely divorced from reality, though, we never actually expected them to succeed. The spam calls coming to your phone as you watch the show are proof that not only have things not changed, but they’ve grown more pernicious through technology. (The brief discussion of robocalls and AI voice tools is chilling.) The legal and political worlds are so saturated with greed that reform is impossible. We all love a David and Goliath story, but we forget that outside of mythical legends, Goliath usually wins.
What Pepsas and Lipman-Stern have, though, is their support for each other. They didn’t succeed in their quest to bring down the telemarketers, but against all odds they did succeed in making a movie together — a movie that isn’t just a YouTube upload by a random person but is now on HBO. And they have their friendship, forged through hardship and uncertainty. They were people the world had written off, but they didn’t write each other off. They didn’t write their friends off. Pepsas took care of his wife through debilitating illness. Lipman-Stern sought out Pepsas even after he relapsed and disappeared. They made a movie together that elevates their friends who were stuck in crappy jobs with them, makes those friends — immensely flawed and troubled as they are — into witnesses and even sometimes heroes.
This is the only way forward for those who lack power in a world of brutality: to let the others without power move to the front of the story. We’re not doing very well at the noble goal of abolishing billionaires, but we don’t have to give them attention. Let them rot in their wealth. The rest of us can pay our care elsewhere. The people on either side of the telemarketing phone call had more in common than they knew, because both were exploited by the owners, the cops, the politicians.
We know who deserves solidarity. We may never live in mansions, but we will be able to live with ourselves.
