The one thing that joins all Americans is a hatred of telemarketers, and Sam Lipman-Stern and Adam Bhala Lough’s Telemarketers won’t win them any brand-new admirers. Made over the course of 20 years, and started by Sam and his pal Patrick J. Pespas when they worked together at New Jersey’s well-known telemarketing giant Civic Development Group (CDG), HBO’s three-part docuseries (Aug. 13) is a grungy first-person account of an criminal occupation, a damning exposé of a corrupt market, and a heartening legend of relationship and redemption. Altogether, it’s a jaw-dropping flight through a Wild West of unhinged outlaws, jagged policeofficers, unethical entrepreneurs, and helpless bureaucrats—at assoonas impressive, shocking, and touching.
Executive produced by Josh and Benny Safdie (no completestrangers to tri-state location griminess) and The Righteous Gemstones group of Danny McBride, Jody Hill, and David Gordon Green, Telemarketers exists just because of Sam, who in the early 2000s dropped out of the ninth grade so he might “hang out and paint graffiti and movie me and my sleazebag buddies being little pieces of shit.” His momsanddads balked at this and required him to get a task, and the just location hiring 14-year-olds was CDG, whose ranks were consistedof of different desperate and dubious types, as well as outright crooks who’d been hired at the regional midway home. Inspired by telemarketing pro Big Ed’s camcorder predispositions, Sam started recording his 9-to-5 experiences at the workplace, which was a carnivalesque free-for-all. When not constantly goofing off, Sam’s associates consumed, engaged with womanofthestreets, and did generous drugs, all out in the open and with careless desert—including Pat (described as a “telemarketing legend”), who’s seen on electroniccamera snorting heroin in Sam’s automobile and nodding off in his cubicle, and whom everybody states carriedout finest when correctly zonked.
Sam was no choirboy either, and in narrative, he confesses that he liked his time at CDG, as do numerous of his previous colleagues. Comprised of Sam’s old raggedy videofootage (which ultimately made its method to YouTube), Telemarketers feels like a long-lost non-fiction cousin of the Safdie’s Good Time crossed with Office Space and American Movie. In its early going, the procedures have a scuzzy electricalpower, with Sam catching plentiful workplace madness, from Glengarry Glen Ross-style hazards to violent fights to, of course, widespread call-center deceptiveness. More than simply a sna