'Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam' documentary series is more than just a music story

Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam, the three-part documentary series has been available for a few months now, but for some reason, it has been in the shadows of some other music documentaries and series, seemingly going unnoticed by the wider Netflix audience, even though the nineties boy band craze seems to be going through a revival these days.

One of the reasons may lie in the fact, that this is more than just your regular music documentary. As the story unravels, it turns out that Lou Pearlman, the man behind all the big boy band names of the decade, from Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC to Take 5, O-Town, and Natural (as well as some solo artists), was involved with some serious shady dealings, that started long before he got involved with music promotion and management.

As the story unravels through the words of most of the key actors in the events (Justin Timberlake prominently missing), including the words of Pearlman himself (through some creative use of AI), the viewers see both the ‘bright’ side of the boy bands successes and even the quite darker one, that involves the creation and use of one of the biggest Ponzi schemes around.

Netflix's Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam is the look behind the scenes you need

For such a series to really work, you not only have to work with an intriguing and riveting story as this one is but to make good use of interviews and other material you have at your disposal and director David Terry Fine and co-executive producers Michael Johnson and Lance Nichols did exactly that here.

And as Johnson explains, “We realized that the scheme that eventually funded these boy bands had started decades prior, with partners that stretched from New York mob families to former Nazi pilots.”

In essence, Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam, works with its dual stories of the success of boy bands and an ‘old-fashioned' crime story, making it a great view for a much wider audience than just the boy band fans.

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