The Sleazy Rise and Humiliating Fall of Ashley Madison

NetflixThe 2015 hacking of adulterous dating website Ashley Madison was a crime, and yet precious few felt sorry for those who were impacted by this offense, be they the company’s CEO and his employees or the 37 million users who were outed as cheaters. Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal, a three-part Netflix docuseries from directors Zoe Hutton and Gagan Rehill, focuses on a couple of sob stories—including a popular Christian vlogging couple caught in the cheating crossfire—which detail the fallout from this headline-making incident, all in an effort to put a human face on a tawdry scandal. No matter the tears and critiques dispensed by those individuals, however, there’s little here to lose sleep over—unless, of course, your profile was in one of the two infamous data dumps.Arriving a year after Hulu and ABC News’ The Ashley Madison Affair, Netflix’s Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal (May 15) is a standard-issue recap of this saga, told through the eyes of a handful of insiders, journalists, and families that were devastated by the release of their confidential information. It begins with Evan Back, Ashley Madison’s former VP of sales, who joined the company in 2007 thanks to his childhood friend Noel Biderman, who had recently been hired as the start-up’s CEO after original founder Darren Morgenstern couldn’t find a way to make the business catch fire. Darren’s brother Marc participates in these proceedings, discussing the early difficulty of selling a site that was all about infidelity. He confesses that Biderman was Ashley Madison’s agent of transformative change, ushering in an era of immense growth thanks to his out-front promotion of the brand on any and every talk show that would book him.Given Ashley Madison’s salaciousness, Biderman quickly became a TV fixture, raising the company’s profile and helping it make money hand over fist. It wasn’t long before expansion took the site around the globe, complete with nation-specific advertising campaigns that cheekily pushed the promise of covert extramarital satisfaction. In archival interview clips (since he didn’t agree to participate in this series), Biderman touts the beneficial aspects of Ashley Madison, claiming that it actually saved marriages by letting people explore their unfulfilled dreams without destroying the unions they loved and relied upon as the bedrock foundations of their lives. Suffice it to say, those arguments don’t sound any more convincing now than they did then; Biderman comes across as a sleazy huckster pretending to be an upstanding gentleman—an image he cultivated with the assistance of wife Amanda, who joined him on television and posed for billboard advertisements, asserting all along that they were in a monogamous relationship.Read more at The Daily Beast.