I am a fierce defender for and advocate of my home state of New Jersey. I’ve heard all the jokes and I have rebuttals for all of them. But take a ride on NJ Transit’s Morris and Essex line from my hometown of Chatham to New York’s Penn Station, and you can see why people make fun of the Garden State the way they do. From the tracks, you get a front row seat to the modern economy’s industrial excess – warehouses sheltering indeterminate contents, scrap yards full of broken down cars, and stretches of (likely polluted) wetlands, all of which are also viewable from the highway, and all of which likely provide people with their image of New Jersey as the smelly, dirty armpit of America.

But what always fascinated me most about these railside attractions are all of the things that seem to be functional – namely, the working cars parked along the tracks, ostensibly being used to transport people to and from work, and the little bits of infrastructure used to help people do jobs that many of us probably don’t even realize exist. They’re the kinds of jobs that are the very definition of behind the scenes, the ones that allow the trains to run (mostly) on time and people to receive their packages by Christmas. They exist on the fringes of society – not in terms of their legality, per se, but in terms of their desirability and visibility. Everyone knows these jobs have to get done, but nobody ever thinks about who does them, because people take for granted that the things they do just get done. These people are themselves invisible to most of us, but their ability to do their jobs, or if they fail to do so, has the power to make or ruin our day.

That shadowy but essential in-betweenness drives Telemarketers, the new hit HBO docuseries that takes place in my maligned home state. Over the stretch of three episodes, directors Sam Lipman-Stern and Adam Bhala Lough dive into the eerie world of telemarketing fundraising, slowly unraveling a conspiracy between big business and shady non-profits that allows unethical, illegal, and predatory sales practices to flourish. On one level, it’s an impressive work of investigative journalism that literally marches to the halls of power to demand action. But on another, it’s a grimy, visceral, and ultimately heartwarming portrait about people who are swept to the sidelines and the things they do to get by.

The series begins with Lipman-Stern explaining that, after he dropped out of high school, he took a job at the New Brunswick office of Civil Development Group, a telemarketing firm that made fundraising calls on behalf of a number of charities and nonprofits, most famously the Fraternal Order of Police. While CDG employees were expected to stick to rigid scripts and a host of rebuttals written to address nearly any situation, everyday life at the office is pure chaos. Populated primarily by teenagers, ex-cons, and active criminals, the CDG offices became a den of crime and chaos – employees play sophomoric pranks on each other, drink on the job, sell drugs to their co-workers, and even solicit prostitutes while they’re ostensibly working. In the words of CDG employee Larry Lazare, the firm “provides a public service almost by accident” by “providing jobs to people who are unemployable.” 

The debauchery became so fascinating to Lipman-Stern that he began bringing a camera with him to document it all, and none of his colleagues was more fascinating than Patrick J. Pespas. Introduced as a “telemarketing legend,” Pespas, sporting dark, tousled hair and a bushy mustache that makes him look like David Weigel’s ne’er-do-well cousin, has an uncanny knack for sticking to the script and nailing down sales, even while nodding off from his frequent heroin use. He and Lipman-Stern become fast friends, and the two wound up discussing some of the shadier aspects of CDG. Most striking is that the firm keeps 90% of the profits they raise for their clients, but more troubling are the underhanded tactics they use to secure that money in the first place. After reorganizing their relationship with the FOP, CDG employees are instructed to tell sales targets that they’re employed by the FOP, which more or less allows them to imply that they’re police, and that they’re selling a form of police protection. Eventually, CDG is shut down by the government but the company’s founders, the Keezer and Pasch families, reform under another name, and anyone who’s used a phone in the last ten years can tell you that the irritating and underhanded tactics haven’t gone anywhere. Over the course of approximately 15 years, Lipman-Stern and Pespas team up to find out why these shady firms keep popping up and if the FOP is more complicit in their barely legal tactics as they seem.

Telemarketers may be the most unpolished thing HBO has ever released – much of the first episode is built around amateur footage shot by Lipman-Stern while he worked at CDG, and even the professionally shot sequences have a shaky, cinéma vérité quality to them. Of course, this rough hewn visual style fits with the series’ setting and subjects. These are people leading far from glamorous lives in far from glamorous locales (sorry, Plainfield), and the handheld nature of much of the cinematography manages to make you feel closer to the action without overdramatizing it. The home footage aesthetic also adds to the series’ overall spectral, vaporwave-adjacent atmosphere – telemarketing is an outdated concept that nonetheless endures, a remnant of an earlier technological age that is still, somehow, lucrative. It makes sense then that a documentary about it would have kind of a hyperreal feel, something created by cheap electronics that depicts outrageous things with a stark but winking frankness.

Pespas, for all intents and purposes the star of the series, is also a rather unpolished lead. As he and Lipman-Stern drive across the country to meet with telemarketing tycoons, regulators, reporters, and eventually a U.S. senator, Pespas serves as the primary on-camera talent, interviewing subjects in an overeager style that seems to leave his interlocutors wondering 1. why the hell they agreed to speak with this guy, and 2. how he knows so much about this stuff. Sometimes Pespas’ lack of experience actively hinders their efforts – he mispronounces the name of National FOP president Patrick Yoes while pursuing him, giving Yoes a convenient excuse to ignore him –  but more often than not it allows him to lull what could be reluctant subjects into a false sense of security, and his sterling record as a telemarketer allows him to go undercover into the more nefarious, AI-augmented version of the business that exists today. 

But Pespas is a compelling beyond his newfound role as dogged citizen journalist, a self-described “fuck up” trying desperately to stay clean and see through his own ambitious project. I often complain that some movies and series would be better off as feature articles, and given how uncinematic telemarketing is, that could have easily applied here. But Pespas is such an engaging presence that he justifies the series’ three episode length alone, and serves as a useful reminder that the corrupt systems the documentary seeks to expose are built out of people, many of them lost and desperate like Pespas himself.

The sympathy the series shows for Pespas, and the unflinching but darkly humorous way it treats the dysfunction of his and his colleagues’ lives, feels like a remarkably fresh approach in an era where art is expected to wear its message on its sleeve. There are elements of the series that are unavoidably topical – the aftermath of the Citizens United decision made it easier for telemarketing firms and their clients to raise money via PACs, and the George Floyd protests and the ensuing public debates about the nature of law enforcement provided them with fiery new talking points. AI rears its ugly head too, as a way for the industry that once employed the unemployable to stop hiring people entirely but still use their voice, while the sequences shot in 2020 and 2021 carry all the hallmarks of the COVID era (i.e., people wearing masks). But Telemarketers trusts its viewers to pick up on the importance of these developments and their impacts on the industry, and America as a whole, on their own. Telemarketers’ central mission – trying to figure out who’s pulling the strings and how they keep getting away with it – remains the focus the entire time, and succeeds as a tool that allows the filmmakers to say something about a lot of things instead of nothing about everything.

The series also manages to avoid reaching sweeping conclusions about the people it documents, elegantly evading the kind of essentialist portrayals that have also become a hallmark of modern media. The heroin addict interviewed by Lipman-Stern who works for telemarketers to fund his habit is a victim of society’s failings, yes – but he also remorselessly targets immigrant business owners for his employer’s scams, selling them the illusion of police protection. The convicted murderer who makes calls for another telemarketing company may have committed a terrible crime, and he may violently curse out his sales targets when they hang up on him – but he’s someone who’s paid his debt to society, and where else is he supposed to get a job? The series even manages to avoid milking modern debates about policing to make itself more topical and buzzworthy – while it’s relentlessly critical of the FOP, that criticism extends to the way it treats its members, in particular a Chicago cop who received an FOP award after surviving a gunshot, but none of the financial support that the union promised him. The end result of this balanced, holistic approach is a kind of centrist populism that doesn’t rail against greed so much as marvel at its audacity – it may not be politically satisfying to many, but it lays the facts bare.

I won’t spoil the ending of Telemarketers, but truth be told, there isn’t much of an ending to spoil. After reaching a precipice I won’t reveal, Lipman-Stern, Lough, and Pespas recognize that they’ve arrived at a natural endpoint for their project, and decide to call it quits. There are no grand calls for legislation or political action, nor a tidy summary of what that which they’ve uncovered says about society. But at the end of the series, Lipman-Stern presents Pespas with a gift that serves as a symbol of how far they came. They did their job – they found a problem they knew something about, and made a lot of noise about it. Given the realities of political power, the future of the telemarketing industry that they helped to expose is out of their hands. But they started in the deadest of dead end jobs, wound up on HBO, and in the process made something that will make people think twice about who they give their money to and why. They may or may not change the world. But they changed their own lives, and that may be enough.