The con is on. And on. And on.
This spring has seen a rash of scripted limited series that can be classified as the true crime subgenre of “true con.” In these stories, no one necessarily gets murdered. But people definitely end up losing their life savings or reputation while audiences are given an inside look at subjects about whom news articles, books, docu-series, or court cases have already shown to be less than credulous.
“Much of what we aspired to do with this was to present a story as fairly as possible and to not assume the worst of people, and to explain that just because people do things that we might disagree with doesn’t automatically make them bad,” said Anne Hathaway, the female lead of Apple TV+’s WeCrashed, who spoke with journalists during the show’s all-virtual winter Television Critics Association press tour in February.
She added that she felt it was “very important” that her limited series, which premieres March 25 and documents the relationship between WeWork co-founder Adam Neumann and his wife Rebekah during the creation (and destruction) of their cult-like office empire, “get the full picture of who [Rebekah] is, because at the end of the day, I’m just playing a human being. I’m just a human being playing a human being.”
Drew Crevallo, who with Lee Eisenberg serves as WeCrashed’s creator and showrunner, noted during the TCA panel that everyone who follows that industry knows about the company’s “meteoric ascent” and its “equally spectacular and kind of historic fall” because “it played out very publicly.” But “what was fascinating to us was there was a relationship—like a love story—at its heart.”
“I do not see them as criminals,” he added, although he does “think that the ethics and morality and human foibles behind their decision are absolutely open for debate.”
But what about true con stories that are about more than just money? Hulu’s limited series The Dropout was filming while its subject, Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, was on trial for criminal fraud after allegations surfaced that her blood-testing device didn’t actually work. Patients’ health and safety were put in jeopardy thanks to a system that, as the story depicts, originated from the mind of a Stanford dropout with fierce ambitions of wealth and success.
The Dropout executive producer Elizabeth Meriwhether told TCA in February that her program, which stars Amanda Seyfried as the infamously raspy-voiced, black turtleneck aficionado, shows “how important science is and how important the facts are and the truth is.” Given that we’re still in a pandemic where misinformation about vaccines, masks, and social distancing are flying around as fast as an airborne virus, she adds that “I actually think this is the perfect time to tell this story.”
The idea of humanizing con artists, or at least making them empathetic, is bound to cause some concerns—most obviously with their accusers. Rachel Williams, whose relationship with convicted con artist Anna Delvey was depicted in Netflix’s Inventing Anna, has called the Julia Garner-starring miniseries a “dangerous” distortion of events that is “reckless with facts.” “This is a narrative designed to create empathy for a character who lacks it,” she told Vanity Fair. “The whole thing is very problematic.”
Christopher Chavez, an associate professor at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communications—where he specializes in topics like pop culture, communication theory, and persuasive communication—told us these stories are “in some ways like modern-day morality tales.”
“The tradition goes back to having these allegorical figures for these larger concepts like greed or ambition or vanity,” Chavez remarked.
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