2023: The Year We Just Let the Grift Happen

Way back in the paranoid and apprehensive days of the COVID pandemic and early vaccinations, Time magazine dubbed 2021 the “year of the grift.”

That year was full of news stories like the ones about not-actually-Spanish yoga influencer Hilaria Baldwin and former tech star Elizabeth Holmes and her not-actually-doing-anything medical device. Prestige TV had a “hold my beer” moment the following year when hoax-themed based-on-a-true-story miniseries like Apple TV+’s WeCrashed and Netflix’s Inventing Anna ushered in a new wave of “true con” programming about people who were apparently easily susceptible to snake oil stories and promises.

Now, two years after Time’s proclamation, pop culture is awash with stories about grifts that aren’t really grifts because everyone knows they’re happening but still let them happen. 

The biggest TV series finale of the year, at least when it comes to prestige TV snobs, was HBO’s Succession. As the name implies, the show is a battle royale of insults and mind fucks over who will (and how they will) take over the media company founded by Brian Cox’s foul-mouthed and tough-loving patriarch, Logan Roy. As predicted by a viral TikTok created by the editor-in-chief of the baby name site Nameberry, the golden ticket went to Tom Wambsgans (Matthew Macfadyen), a self-made outsider who was neither born into this world like Logan’s children nor particularly skilled at anything marketable like Lukas Matsson (Alexander Skarsgard), the tech wiz who brought Tom on to be the puppet to his master. 

That those in the Roy inner circle—most of all Tom’s estranged wife and Logan’s daughter Shiv (Sarah Snook)—knew this was going to happen and still let it go through, resulted in a much-debated series finale cliffhanger.

Meanwhile, after four seasons of stalking, imprisoning, murdering, and obsessing over people in Netflix’s You, Penn Badgley’s Joe Goldberg may have finally said hello to the one: Charlotte Ritchie’s Kate Galvin, an aristocrat and alleged do-gooder with a sinister familial past who, if she didn’t know already, has enough private investigators at the ready to find out Joe’s secrets and past, um, hobbies. Joe’s former student, Nadia Faran (Amy-Leigh Hickman), also figured out some of his secrets. However, not only did she not go to authorities, but she ended up taking the fall for him. 

Whether either of these women will break their silences and take Joe down remains to be seen; whatever their choice, they are already complicit in letting the game continue, at least so far. 

The film Saltburn, writer-director Emerald Fennell’s sour candy of an erotic thriller, is even more blatant in its grift, essentially asking the question “What if audiences knew what was going to happen in Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 thriller novel The Talented Mr. Ripley and sat back and enjoyed the bloody con?”

In Saltburn, Barry Keoghan plays Oliver, a pervish outcast at Oxford who becomes enamored with golden boy Felix (Jacob Elordi). It’s not just Felix himself whom Oli lusts after; it’s also his lifestyle and family, especially their sprawling Downton Abbey-esq mansion. So he systematically plots each person’s demise. 

The only family member Oli doesn’t either kill, seduce into taking their own life, or get disinherited is the father, Richard E. Grant’s James Catton. He’s suspicious enough to pay the boy to go away, but really should have acted further. And yet, he didn’t?

The ouroboros moment for this trend may have come this summer, when Curbed reported that the hottest read in the Hamptons was novelist Emma Cline’s The Guest. A seductive story of manipulation and Machiavellianism, the book follows a delusional and selfish sex worker so determined not to give up the good life she found with a wealthy paramour that she spends nearly a week traipsing around his wealthy and secluded beach community and destroying others’ lives. People, mainly staff, could stop her. But that would mean implicating themselves.

But we’ve also seen the uninvited guest motif as a metaphor for karma. In Netflix’s The Fall of the House of Usher, creator Mike Flanagan’s update of the Edgar Allan Poe story, Bruce Greenwood and Mary McDonnell play siblings of a nefarious pharmaceutical company who are haunted by a mysterious figure played by Carla Gugino. As each Usher falls, their misdeeds are paid for in their blood and suffering, all spurred on by a woman none of them know, but who seems to intimately know them. 

Or maybe it’s a stand-in for societal racism. Hulu’s The Other Black Girl, Zakiya Dalila Harris and Rashida Jones’ adaptation of the former’s best-selling novel, is an attack at the corporate structure when Sinclair Daniel’s editorial assistant becomes convinced the new woman—the only other Black woman—at her publishing company is out to get her. 

And there have been instances of more clear-cut messages that grifting is wrong and will only get you so far. Male fragility is the true villain of Oppenheimer and Barbie. Both summer blockbusters have stories of outsiders—Robert Downey Jr.’s Lewis Strauss and Ryan Gosling’s Ken, respectively—who feel so jilted at the protagonists’ disinterest in them that they become obsessed with destroying them. On the FOX reality show Snake Oil, which has a Shark Tank-like premise, except that some of the products are fake, the goal is for audiences and judges to celebrate when they prove to be smarter than the con.

The message from all of those programs: shut down the troublemaker before that person makes a fool out of you and ruins what you created. 

Otherwise, audiences are not only encouraged to watch the grift happen but we also seem… cool with it? Maybe it’s because we’re exhausted. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported earlier this month that 1.3% of U.S. adults had chronic fatigue syndrome between 2021 and 2022—although USA Today suggests that number is actually higher. Or, maybe after years or hearing claims of stolen presidential elections and seeing property theft actually increasing, we just expect it.

Or maybe we want to revel in the ridiculousness. 

The best example of how eager we all seem to be to see how these grifts play out is the case against George Santos. The disgraced politician was a mastery of fraud and manipulation all the way up until he wasn’t—so much so that New York Magazine compiled a list of all of his proven and still-alleged lies (examples include lying to donors and using the money for Hermes and OnlyFans, claiming his grandmother was a Holocaust victim, and swindling a disabled veteran whose dog was dying). 

Santos was expelled from Congress on December 1st. On December 4th, he joined Cameo, the video-sharing app where people can pay for him to record specific greetings and comments. As of press time, he’s charging $500 a pop and spots are going fast. 

Whitney Friedlander is an entertainment journalist with, what some may argue, an unhealthy love affair with her TV. A former staff writer at both Los Angeles Times and Variety, her writing has also appeared in Cosmopolitan, Vulture, The Washington Post and others. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, and three daughters (two of whom are cats).

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