circleWith hundreds of millions of records sold, still going strong into their fourth decade, and praised by the likes of Taylor Swift, boy bands Backstreet Boys and N’Sync are truly pop kings. But they were also the creations of one of America’s biggest criminals, and the new Netflix documentary series Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam explores this strange duality with vigor and style.
This is the strange, very American story of Lou Pearlman, the man who crashed his own airship to fund the launch of his boy band empire, and ultimately made his fortune leading what is widely believed to be the longest Ponzi scheme in U.S. history. As his own real-life casting director, Dirty Pop deftly captures the many sides of a man who conned everyone from secretaries to powerful politicians and bankers, yet who also seemed genuinely happy to be part of a band he formed with love.
It started as a daydream. While helping New Kids on the Block lease planes, Pearlman saw the staggering revenue the band was generating and reportedly exclaimed, “I’m in the wrong business!” From there, he began scouting for talent, forming the group that would eventually become the Backstreet Boys. Once the group reached the height of pop stardom, he very wisely decided that someone would one day make his Pepsi to Coca-Cola, so he might as well give it a go himself. And so ‘NSync became his next big project. A dizzying array of bands followed, including chart-topping bands O-Town and LFO, Hulk Hogan’s daughter Brooke, and teen idol Aaron Carter.
But there was a dark side to this success: All but two of Pearlman’s bands and solo bands sued him, and all of these lawsuits were lost or settled. Pearlman was eventually criminally charged with conspiracy, money laundering, and filing a false bankruptcy petition, and received a 25-year prison sentence, almost unheard of for a white-collar crime.
Dirty Pop digs deep into the complicated reality of a band that owes much of its phenomenal success to its fiercely loyal relationship with Pearlman, but ultimately came to view him as a Judas, voiced by Michael Johnson. Johnson, the drummer in Pearlman’s boy band Natural, ends up in the con man’s entourage, but later rebels when Pearlman’s mask begins to crumble. (Johnson also serves as Dirty Pop’s executive producer.)
“He’s one of the most complicated characters I’ve ever heard of,” Johnson said in a video interview. “He’s the guy who killed one of his best friends, stole all of people’s money, and yet he still loaned me his (or someone else’s) private jet to go to my grandfather’s funeral and supported me when I broke up with my girlfriend. Everything about him was genius, but he really applied it in different ways.”
Johnson’s journey through Pearlman’s transformation from father figure to traitor gives the series a necessary and powerful emotional core, and the drummer’s heartfelt testimony drives home the human cost of bigwig deception. “I’ve had a front-row seat to the ways in which greed, power and fame can be weaponized,” he told me. “How Lou was able to exploit everyone’s dreams. The people I met and cared about in 1998 never recovered from Lou’s crimes, and the impact still weighs heavily on me today.”
Pearlman’s story has been told in many ways before, but one thing that sets Dirty Pop apart is the level of archival research that went into the project. The series’ creators unearthed a treasure trove of “pre-star” footage that adds an extra layer of fun and ’90s nostalgia. This is ultimately as much a story of the quintessential American con man as it is a story of what music was like in the ’90s. “Digging through the archives was an exciting task almost every week,” Johnson says. “We were constantly saying to each other, ‘Whoa, did you see that?!'”
Dirty Pop does a good job of telling the story from multiple sides, giving us a glimpse into how a guy like Pearlman gets things done and what makes him tick, which is fascinating, especially as these worlds often merge. “There’s a scene where Lou and the Backstreet Boys are on the piano singing Commodores’ Easy,” says Lance Nichols, the show’s executive producer. “This guy is apparently running a Ponzi scheme, but somehow he’s playing piano with his kids like it’s a Sunday morning. It’s surreal to me.”
One of the docuseries’ most interesting choices is to use AI technology to insert quotes from Pearlman’s autobiography, “Bands, Brands and Billions,” into promotional footage of him speaking in his home office, essentially deepfaking him. “He’s really free-spirited, and he expresses that a lot in the book, so we wanted to incorporate that in some way,” show director David Fine said. “The idea came up as an aside, like a lot of good ideas, and then Michael said, ‘Why not just deepfake him?’ And something clicked. I thought, ‘Oh my gosh, he was a deepfake.’ I mean, he fooled a lot of people. So, formally, I think the choice is very much rooted in the character.”
These AI-rendered parts of Perlman provide a kind of counterpoint throughout the show, giving him a side that’s less performative and more intimately aimed at viewers than his public-facing persona. “The words of his book point to the reality that he lived in, and it was really important for us to check back into Lou’s reality throughout the series,” Johnson said. “This guy might put you to sleep, or he might make you believe what he says,” Johnson said. “If he offered you a deal, would you take it?”
Concerned about the ethics of Pearlman’s deepfakes, the team brought in consultants from the MIT Open Documentary Lab to try to leverage the technology in a responsible way. “As someone who produces unscripted nonfiction, I think this is a usable tool, as long as it’s done ethically,” Nichols said. “This is probably something we’ll all be living with for the rest of our lives. This technology… there’s no going back.”
Dirty Pop gives us a chance to consider what kind of people celebrity culture produces, and makes us wonder if the next Pearlman is orchestrating the rise of the next big pop artist. There will be plenty of opportunities to tell this story. “It’s a very American story. You don’t hear about Ponzi schemes as much elsewhere,” Johnson says. “People live off the rat race of capitalism, and having access to celebrity and power is one of the easiest ways to manipulate people. Lou knew how to exploit these people perfectly. They would do anything for him because they wanted to feel cool. He made them feel cool.”
