Telemarketers, directed by Sam Lipman-Stern and Adam Bhala Lough, is a 3-part docuseries about how Lipman-Stern, along with his friend and colleague Patrick J. Pespas blew the lid off the entire charity telemarketing racket, especially after they both worked for years at a New Jersey-based company called Civil Development Group (CDG).
Opening Shot: 2010. A shirtless Sam Lipman-Stern sits down on his bed and says, “I want to make a documentary about CDG. I’ve been thinking about it since I was a little fucking kid.”
The Gist: Lipman-Stern is a self-admitted “scumbag”; he dropped out of school when he was 14 and wanted to just tag buildings and skate with his scumbag friends all day, but his parents demanded he get a job. So he finds work at CDG, which in 2001 was paying $10/hour for people to be telemarketers, with no experience needed or background checks performed.
CDG had become the biggest telemarketer to raise money on behalf of organizations like the New Jersey Fraternal Order of Police and similar charities. What they would do is pay the organization to take on their fundraising tasks, provide scripts for the telemarketers to say, along with rebuttals to just about any objection from a caller, and they end up taking 90% of the money brought in.
We see a lot of video from the mid-to-late 2000s, as Lipman-Stern and others documented what one telemarketer called “going to a backyard barbecue every day” at CDG. The company openly recruited at halfway houses and brought in lots of people who couldn’t get work anywhere else. They didn’t care what went on in the office, as long as their telemarketers made their sales goals. So there were drugs dealt and taken, sexual favors sold in bathroom stalls… one guy was even selling pit bull puppies in the office.
Lipman-Stern and Pespas became fast friends when the former started at CDG. The outspoken Pespas was often high on heroin or something else, but always was one of the top sellers at the company. He somehow managed to get people to part with their $10 here and $25 there, despite being royally fucked up while doing it. But Pespas always knew what a scam CDG was pulling; in fact, they had to pay fines in the late ’90s when they portrayed themselves as law enforcement officials during fundraising calls.
In 2010, after CDG changed their sales model to have their telemarketers claim they were from the FOP organizations and that 100% of the money would go to those FOPs, the Federal Trade Commission finally shut them down. But CDG set the model for other companies to follow, and Lipman-Stern and Pespas decided that they wanted to expose the entire industry.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Telemarketers certainly has the somewhat glib feeling of docuseries like Pepsi, Where’s My Jet? It’s not a coincidence that Danny McBride is one of the series’ executive producers.
Our Take: We do not live far from where CDG’s main office was, and the Jerseyness of it all filters through the entire first episode of Telemarketers. Pat Pespas is just the type of character that almost everyone who lives in New Jersey knows well: Smart but messed up, wearing his Giants jacket during the winter, espousing not-all-that-crazy theories about politics and life between drags of weed and swigs of beer.
Lipman-Stern and Lough are able to bring that feeling to the screen, between the extensive footage shot at the CDG offices and the interviews Lipman-Stern and Pespas conduct with their former CDG colleagues. They all admit how completely screwed up things were there, but seem to recall those salad days as if they were in some sort of ex-con summer camp, doing chair races in the bullpen and watching YouTube videos Lipman-Stern and others shot of people sleeping on the job, getting high and other things you’d never see in a normal office.
What’s interesting is that only the first episode goes into the chaotic goings-on at CDG; the second and third episode document how Lipman-Stern and Pespas remained friends after CDG shut down, and decided to reveal how other companies were taking CDG’s model and running with it.
Those two episodes will be as much about the friendship between the two, who are probably about 20 years apart in age, and how they banded together as much as it is about the scandals they uncovered. Given how much of a character Pespas is, though, we were ready to see a lot more of him by the end of the first episode, especially the fact that his sense of right and wrong was so strong even through the drug-induced hazes Lipman-Stern showed him in while at work.
Sex and Skin: There’s a scene where a woman starts to unbuckle a man’s belt in a bathroom stall, but that’s about it.
Parting Shot: Lipman-Stern talks to someone on the phone, with their voices altered. The person on the phone says that the most dangerous people to worry about if they expose the charity scam isn’t the owners of CDG, as we see flashing police lights.
Sleeper Star: Pat’s wife Sue has no problems throwing in her own commentary as Lipman-Stern talks to Pat in archival footage. She also has no problem yelling to him how many hot dogs he wants as he’s being interviewed.
Most Pilot-y Line: None that we could find.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Telemarketers made us laugh just as much as it made us outraged. We were eager to see just where Lipman-Stern and Pespas go with their mission to expose all charity fundraising companies.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.