“The Con Queen of Hollywood” relies on crude but colorful 2D animations to help narrate the story they play like a mix between courtroom illustrations and storyboards for re-creations that never got filmed. It was also one of the more impressive ruses, considering the end reveal it was all orchestrated by one man who adopted multiple voices and characters - women and men - and even at one point posed as Wendi Murdoch. This scam is one of the more heartbreaking ones, since each person is an aspiring creative of some kind who thinks they are getting their big break. The first episode, “The Con Queen of Hollywood,” charts an elaborate scheme that sent aspiring screenwriters, photographers, and actors on a wild goose chase through Indonesia on their own dime, all with the promise of reimbursement and a large paycheck at the end. At the midway point an investigator, lawyer, or reporter is introduced in order to help explain the details of the con: How the person got away with it, how they got caught, and what exactly was illegal about it. In the three episodes provided to critics, “Generation Hustle” covers each story with a rather formulaic approach: The first half of each episode sets up the scam through interviews with various marks and occasionally the scammer themselves, and the second half reveals the details of each deception and charts the person’s ultimate fall from grace. The WeWork episode already has competition with the just-released Hulu documentary “WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn” - although too much coverage didn’t seem to hurt the two competing Fyre Festival documentaries that came out around the same time in 2019.
Disgraced WeWork founder Adam Neumann and faux socialite Anna Delvey (AKA Anna Sorokin) have already been covered extensively, both in writing and film, and their 50-minute episodes aren’t nearly as satisfying or juicy as the extensive reporting that can be easily found online. The 10-part docuseries, premiering tonight on HBO Max, profiles 10 recent scammers of varying levels of notoriety.
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