A Hit HBO Documentary Fails Spectacularly. It’s a Triumph.

In the final episode of the HBO documentary Telemarketers, Patrick J. Pespas, the self-styled freelance journalist who serves as the three-part series’ arguable protagonist and indisputably its most colorful figure, announces that he’s about to storm a Fraternal Order of Police convention “Michael Moore–style.” There’s just one problem—he literally doesn’t know who he’s talking to. “Mr. Yates!” he yells at the FOP’s president as he attempts to buttonhole him, trying to nail down the police union’s complicity in what the series calls “the biggest telemarketing scam in American history.” As the target of Pespas’ questioning slips away from him, the mind reels at the perfection of the moment: a public-facing police official not only stonewalling public inquiries but even denying his own identity; “Nope—don’t know Mr. Yates.” There’s just one problem. The FOP president’s last name isn’t Yates. It’s Yoes.

The runaway success of Michael Moore’s Roger & Me made him the first person to become famous solely for making documentary films, and he’s still pretty much the only one. As recently as 2015, he could still sell out a 2,000-seat theater for the premiere of his new movie. In 2017, he even got his own Broadway show. (Ticket sales for that one were a little less robust.) It’s been more than 30 years, but no one has displaced Moore as the avatar of on-camera muckraking, a hybrid of investigative journalism and public protest. The real goal of Roger & Me, which centered on General Motors’ CEO Roger Smith’s decision to close a manufacturing plant in Moore’s hard-hit hometown, wasn’t for Moore to get a meeting with Smith. It was to highlight, and document, the impossibility of doing so—the extent to which no amount of patience or persistence could force a corporate titan to confront the consequences of his actions. The point wasn’t to succeed. It was to fail.

By that standard, Telemarketers is a smashing success. The series, directed by Sam Lipman-Stern and Adam Bhala Lough, is the fruit of nearly 20 years of on-and-off filming, beginning when a teenage Lipman-Stern was Pespas’ co-worker at the telemarketing company Civic Development Group in the early aughts. After dropping out of high school in ninth grade, Lipman-Stern says his initial goals were to “hang out and paint graffiti and film me and my scumbag friends being little pieces of shit.” But he needed a job, and CDG was the only place that would hire a 14-year-old. Most of his co-workers were adults, but they were also barely employable, often due to their criminal records. “Every other person was either a drug dealer who hadn’t been caught yet or a drug dealer who was just out of jail,” one former CDG caller says. But as the manager of the New Brunswick, New Jersey, office where Lipman-Stern and Pespas worked explains, “If you could talk and read, you were in.” In the footage he shot during his time in the office, most of which went no further than being uploaded to YouTube for laughs, you can see Pespas snorting heroin on the job, nodding off in the middle of calls but pulling himself back to consciousness just in time to close the sale.

Although police unions weren’t CDG’s only clients, they were some of the most profitable, with 90 percent of contributions going into CDG’s coffers. The telemarketers were trained to redirect inquiries so they wouldn’t legally be forced to disclose that they had no actual affiliation with the police or that only 10 percent of donations would make their way to the various state and local FOP branches. Instead, they wooed prospective donors with the idea that their money would go directly to the families of officers killed in the line of duty, and the winking implication that the gold shield sticker that they would get for giving at the highest level might even get them out of the occasional speeding ticket. This was all shady enough that the company was shut down by the Federal Trade Commission in 2010, and its founders were permanently banned from the fundraising business. But the practices rose again, this time under a model in which the telemarketers were employed as FOP “consultants,” able to say they worked directly for the police and that every penny given would go to the cops. And while the organizations that work for the FOP are occasionally shut down, the FOP branches remain unscathed, despite evidence that some colluded and even initiated the fraud. By 2019, which was when Lipman-Stern started making Telemarketers in earnest, the model had evolved further so that the telemarketers were employed by political action committees with names like Back the Blue, giving them First Amendment protections that further stymied the soliciting sector’s already flimsy regulation.

This is the dragon a recovering drug addict and an untrained filmmaker set out to slay, which makes it unsurprising that they don’t meet with much success. (Bhala Lough came on board later in the process, after Lipman-Stern realized that his distant relation was also a veteran documentarian.) The pair emulate Moore’s attention-getting techniques, chasing down wrongdoers camera in hand, but they don’t seem to grasp how much of Moore’s on-screen persona was a calculated put-on, the studied simple-mindedness of a former newspaper and magazine editor who understood that naïveté would play best for the camera, and who was ready with a list of carefully researched questions for any higher-up dumb or smug enough to fall for the act. And Pespas’ gift for salesmanship doesn’t map onto the skill set for freelance journalism, even after he decides that’s what he’s doing. As he rolls through cellphone calls in a local McDonald’s he uses as an ad hoc office—even though, as he gripes after he and Lipman-Stern get kicked out, their free Wi-Fi sucks—Pespas acts like he’s fishing with dynamite, confronting one front-office FOP figure after another with blunt accusations, then suffering mounting frustration as they all hang up on him. When the movie manages to land a face-to-face interview, he arrives in sunglasses and a loud sport coat—and when Lipman-Stern suggests that dark glasses aren’t the best look for an on-camera interviewer, Pespas promises he’s just waiting for a dramatic moment to remove them.

Pespas’ ineptitude can be frustrating to watch, and it would be moreso if you expected him to get anywhere. But the movie never quite joins him in the delusion that one person’s dedication is enough to bring down the system. Pespas might be emulating Michael Moore, but Lipman-Stern said his inspiration for the interviews was Da Ali G Show, where half the joke was just getting powerful figures in front of the camera. Though Pespas isn’t much of an interrogator, he’s enormously charismatic, lovable even despite, or because of, his tendency to screw up his big opportunities. He and Lipman-Stern track one malefactor to Houston and plan to grab him on the way to his car, but Pespas can’t resist grabbing some Texas barbecue from a food cart and ends up sprinting after his quarry with sauce-stained hands, unable to get out a question before his subject speeds away.

Then again, what would have happened if the earnest questioner and his camera crew had caught up to their prey? Chances are, not a lot. The most heartbreaking moment of the series comes when Pespas meets with Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut senator who went after corrupt telemarketers during his tenure as the state’s attorney general. Faced with someone with the power to actually do something, Pespas talks a blue streak about the practices he’s witnessed and taken part in, while the senator sits across from him stone-faced, eventually muttering something about having his staff look into it and rushing off to a vote. It feels as if he’s well and truly blown it, gotten his big turn in the spotlight and promptly tripped over his own feet. But as the staffers whose cooperation Blumenthal just finished promising instead order the crew to break down their equipment and clear the room, the camera catches sight of a frame full of patches bearing the insignias of local police departments. The fix, it seems, was always in. And if that’s the case, then maybe speaking the truth to a senator’s face was the most Patrick Pespas could ever hope to achieve—especially if there was an HBO crew there to see him do it. It’s pretty far from a win, but there are worse ways to lose.