From ‘The Dropout’ to ‘WeCrashed,’ Inside the Fascination With Scam TV Shows

variety.com:

Sasha Urban editorOut of the bustling ecosystem of this season’s true crime dramas and docs, “The Dropout,” Hulu’s dynamic adaptation of the ABC News podcast about disgraced Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes, has emerged as an innovative creation in the sub-genre of scam TV.

But when she created the series, showrunner Elizabeth Meriwether didn’t see it that way at first.“I never really thought of ‘The Dropout’ as a scam show,” she says. “I saw it as a character study.”Meriwether accepts the placement of her series within the overall scam genre, which has never been more popular, but says there are more differences between the myriad projects than similarities.“The quote-unquote scam that was committed is so different in each show, and I think that may be easy to lose sight of,” she says.

It’s impossible to name every possible flavor of schemes. As with “The Dropout,” the story may feature FOMO-fueled investors blindly cashing in on a burgeoning business — see Adam Neumann’s co-working startup on “WeCrashed” and Uber CEO Travis Kalanick’s venture on “Super Pumped.” Both have been investigated but not found guilty of charges.There are also one-person operations, including convicted lawyer Eric C.

Conn’s half-billion-dollar Social Security scheme in “The Big Conn” and Anna Delvey in “Inventing Anna,” who served time.Sometimes, the con artists justify their actions by claiming a higher power, as did Sarma Melngailis and her husband Anthony Strangis in Netflix’s “Bad Vegan.”In Prime Video’s “LuLaRich,” documentarians Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason explore the (still active) multi-level-marketing company LuLaRoe, which has been accused of being a pyramid scheme.