Telemarketers

A documentary about a company called Civic Development Group might sound as banal as it comes. The name hardly conjures anything but a gray office park. Lurking just under CDG’s veneer of vagueness, though, is a frothy story we all might have a stake in.

Telemarketers is a quick three-part docuseries that pulls back the curtain on a telemarketing company, through the eyes of the people who work there, exposing the many ways it’s tried (and succeeded) to deceive its customers. What sounds like a potentially dry premise in reality is anything but. 

The central figure behind the camera is Sam Lipman-Stern, who started working for CDG when he was a 14-year-old high school dropout in the early aughts, a kid who’d rather spend his time hanging out with his buddies and doing graffiti. What he assumes will be a boring adult job, though, turns out to resemble a frat house basement. Recruited for their willingness to do depressing work (or lack of a choice to do anything else), CDG was comprised of an eclectic crew of self-described dirtbag teenagers, those on the fritz with the law, and folks with criminal records who can’t get hired elsewhere. The result is Office Space-style workplace tomfoolery mixed with Project X-style debauchery, but completely real, all put to record by Lipman-Stern’s camcorder. 

Their job seems simple enough, making cold calls on behalf of a police union, and talking ordinary folks into donating small sums. They follow a script and learn to be relentless, facing constant rejection and fighting through it. In the world of CDG, if it takes smoking a joint, or something stronger, at the office to make it through the workday, so be it. However, the true reason such unorthodox workplace behavior was permitted becomes clearer as a handful of employees look up from the haze and start asking questions, such as where does the money they’re raising actually go?

The story kicks into gear when Lipman-Stern teams up with Pat Pespas, his lovable, heroin-addicted coworker with a nose for corruption. They set sail on a rinky-dink documentary operation, hoping to uncover the high-level scam behind their low-level jobs. There’s cringeworthy humor in their attempt to do “Michael Moore shit,” but it’s met with real intrigue about the hidden-in-plain-sight deception of which they’ve unwittingly become a part. Unfolding over three hour-long parts, the episodes are well-paced, hooking you into a story you didn’t know you cared about. The central characters are lovable in their warts-and-all realness and give excellent texture to a story that’s ultimately about phone calls and paperwork. The deep, structural corruption they uncover not only in the field of telemarketing but in the police themselves, turns it from a niche story to an important exposé.