Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam tells a well known story about a dubious figure in the entertainment industry from the empathetic perspective of his victims, but it’s also a bit of a con itself. Director David Terry Fine’s limited series about the underhanded dealings of boy band and aviation impresario Lou Pearlman pays only a small bit of attention to what’s alluded to in the title. In that respect Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam pales in comparison to the likes of The Boy Band Con from a few years back, which had a lot more access and resorted to a lot less narrative trickery to expose Pearlman’s wanton misdeeds and swindles. And while credit can be given to Fine for looking beyond Pearlman’s most high profile con and spending more time examining grifts that often flew under the radar (or more pointedly, never flew at all, to use an aviation metaphor), this unnecessarily overlong and redundant series adds very little insight from a distressingly narrow number of perspectives.
Lou Pearlman, a middle aged businessman first known as the CEO of plane rental company TransContinental Airlines and a TCBY franchisee, saw an opportunity when he noticed bands like New Kids on the Block constantly renting private jets. The Floridian thought there was more money to be made in promoting musical acts put together to appeal to teenage girls, and began shifting his attention from TransContinental Airlines (as well as a “thriving” business leasing out blimps and airships) to TransCon Records. Pearlman’s teeny bopper empire started with Backstreet Boys (who were around since 1993, but never took off stateside until 1997) and NSYNC, making millions from touring artists who only ever saw small percentages of the bands’ massive profits. After his two biggest acts sued to get out of their contracts and settled to gain their creative and financial freedom, Pearlman continued on with lesser acts like O-Town, Natural, LFO, and Take 5, but his profile never achieved the same heights. But Pearlman was never hurting for money, as his aviation endeavours turned out to be one of the biggest and longest running Ponzi scams in history.
It’s not long into Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam before things start to feel amiss. Fine (Untold: Operation Flagrant Foul, the John Daly 30 for 30 episode Hit It Hard) opens with AI altered footage designed to make it look and sound like the late Pearlman (who passed away in 2016, aged 62) is in his office reading passages from his wildly discredited autobiography, Bands, Brands, & Billions. Not only does the series open up a can of worms with such a gambit (is it ethical to recreate someone’s image and words, even if the person in question was a criminal and abuser?), but the effect is an unnerving distraction out of the gate. Fine doesn’t go back to the AI Pearlman too much, but once is more than enough to give viewers the wrong kind of icky feeling.
The next red flag (and I’m not talking about the unnecessary and off-putting mood lighting that’s sometimes used to showcase interview subjects) is just how few people seem willing to talk about Pearlman for Fine’s production, which is surprising given that so many have gone on the record about their interactions and dealings with him over the years. The aforementioned The Boy Band Con had a much larger range of interview subjects with a number of differing perspectives and viewpoints. Here, the tone is largely bitter and tired among those willing to speak out against Pearlman’s cons, and unnervingly chummy among those who speak to his “character.” With only AJ McLean, Howie Dorough, and Chris Kirkpatrick willing to give new interviews about Pearlman’s heyday as a music exec, the biggest part of Fine’s title is also the most lacking. Anyone interested in a variety of other perspectives and thoughts will only find familiar looking archival footage here. The real focus isn’t on Pearlman’s time as a band manager and string puller (or long rumoured allegations of sexual impropriety), but as a different kind of con artist.
The truth behind Pearlman’s aviation empire and his attempts to stay one step ahead of the law in the years leading up to his eventual arrest and conviction on a variety of conspiracy and money laundering charges is a less told story, and in that respect Fine deserves some credit for pulling viewers’ focus in a different, equally important direction. Using Pearlman’s ill fated venture into blimps as a perfect metaphor for all of his business practices, Fine examines the little (but still largely wealthy) people whose lives were damaged by the fast taking huckster’s schemes. The amount of money raised by Pearlman over the years through shadow companies and false promises is staggering, and makes his pop culture infamy pale in comparison.
But even in the examination of the cons that happened away from the music industry limelight, Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam still suffers from a narrow point of view. While it’s chilling to hear from people who enabled Pearlman’s scams to happen – some of whom are devastated and conciliatory, while others remain blissfully in denial that any wrongdoing happened – there’s not enough perspective being given about how devastating his impact was on so many lives, outside of one really sad story that ends in deep depression for someone who used to be one of his staunchest supporters. It’s trying to tell Pearlman’s story in a greater context, but comes up just as short as the title’s implied goal. Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam is a surprisingly dispassionate look at unquestioned power and avarice run amok that kind of shrugs off its subjects laundry list of misdeeds and just some bad stuff that happened.
Maybe that’s because Pearlman has been covered to death in a variety of better, more empathetic ways over the years. There’s a resignation to Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam that suggests there isn’t more to say, when there’s plenty of of evidence and dangling threads that point to the contrary. It’s a film about a strong topic that acts like it doesn’t have much at all to say outside of a relatively agreed upon, simplified version of the facts. It’s another piece of content for the mill when there’s a lot of better sources on the subject already out in the open. Stretched to three parts when it barely has enough new information to sustain a single 80 minute feature, Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam is a huge miss that does none of the people hurt by Pearlman any major favours.
Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam is now available to stream on Netflix.
