The story of Lou Pearlman is pretty well-known by now. He was the main behind-the-scenes force behind the boy band boom of the late 1990s, including the Backstreet Boys, NSYNC, and later groups like O-Town.
He ended up falling out bitterly with most of those groups — NSYNC named their album No Strings Attached after their split with him — and a few years after the boom, Pearlman was convicted of executing a massive Ponzi scheme. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison and died behind bars in 2016. There were also whispers of sexual improprieties on Pearlman’s part, although nothing that ever rose to the level of criminal indictment or conviction.
This story has been told before, and now it’s been told again in a three-part Netflix documentary called Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam.
Dirty Pop, which has been near the top of Netflix’s charts in the last couple of weeks, is not to be confused with The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story, a different documentary from 2019 that former NSYNC member Lance Bass produced.
The new documentary has a few things wrong with it, many of which are frequent issues in this type of documentary.
Problems with the Doc
First off, it’s three parts, each about 45 minutes long; there’s no good reason for it not just to be a movie instead. Second, most key, better-known figures got nowhere near any on-camera interviews.
Perhaps worst of all, the documentary features an AI/deepfake “interview” with Pearlman himself so he can “narrate” it.
The words really are his, from his autobiography, but what’s so ridiculous is just how unnecessary this is, from a narrative standpoint, it adds absolutely nothing. This is a terrible trend and certainly not worth the likely considerable expense. It’s also not clear why we need Pearlman’s perspective.
Much like the Dan Schneider docuseries Quiet on Set, the subject of Dirty Pop is an extremely unlikable and loathsome individual, likely guilty of a long list of bad acts, and personally repulsive to boot. And also, like Schneider, there are way worse allegations out there about the subject, but the filmmakers don’t quite have the goods, so that stuff gets glossed over.
There is some decent use of archival footage, especially of the classic boy bands, and we hear much of their music. At one point, we see footage of a very young Justin Timberlake pointing at a poster of Janet Jackson, the woman whose career he would later derail, and expressing his crush on her.
Instead of the Last Dance trick, where the filmmaker hands the subject an iPad and asks them to react to a clip, Dirty Pop’s filmmakers have people watch a TV monitor in front of them instead of an iPad.
There are certainly many more compelling ways to explore the boy band phenomenon, and the rise and fall of Lou Pearlman specifically, than whatever Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam thought it was doing.
