July Bonus Review: Generation Hustle
A ten-episode tour of scammers and frauds that focuses on process
the true crime that's worth your time
The crime
Per the docuseries’s Rotten Tomatoes landing page, ten-part HBO Max flim-flam-useries Generation Hustle mixes “true-crime capers with fresh, glossy stories of charismatic fakes, colorful imposters, and unabashed ambition.” We’ve talked about a couple of the grifters — Anna Delvey; the Hollywood Con Queen — quite a bit here at Best Evidence; other stories were new to me (scam-rap icon Teejayx6, for one).
The story
IndieWire’s Jude Dry didn’t care for Generation Hustle, complaining that what the series is “lacking in substance cannot be made up for in shoddily-constructed style. Like the scams within, the stories feel half-baked, under-researched, and flimsy.” I agree that a number of GH episodes seem half-hearted vis-a-vis the production design; the hot-pink chyrons echoing key interviewee phrases in the Con Queen ep are kind of corny, as is the use of actual people/marks in reenactments. And I wouldn’t use the word “flimsy,” exactly, but some episodes don’t push as far as you’d hope, like the WeWork-isode, which sort of starts down a couple of different paths involving the commodification of community, the role of narrative in the job of a CEO and how it overlaps with the role of narrative for a con artist (or, honestly, any human being, whether we’re aware of it or not)…but then retreats to its chronological episode framework and the 45-ish-minute runtime. The series’s brief isn’t necessarily to explore the meta quality of storytelling in scams, but it isn’t necessarily not that, either.
Where Generation Hustle shines, when it does, is in chronicling what Decider’s Joel Keller called the “anatomy of a scam” — the process-y stuff, in other words. It gets good access to the victims of the grifts, and Keller also notes that, generally, they’re positioned as sources of information, not “survivors” to be pitied; I think GH has a solid understanding of what appeals to us about con narratives, and that it’s not entirely the bringing of the cons to justice. True, the series isn’t breaking new ground from a structural standpoint, but there’s something to be said for a straightforward accounting of a fraud — the fraud first and foremost, versus a psychoanalysis of the fraudster or the pursuit of justice for the fraudee.