Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal

Out of the millions of Ashley Madison subscribers, the producers decided to focus the majority of their attention on a Christian vlogger couple and a pastor. Meanwhile, the company itself is treated as a completely innocent party and handled with kids gloves. The agenda is right in your face, and it's there for far too long. The last two episodes are basically the exact same thing. I get it, long ago I used to write essays for school and pad them with paragraphs of repetitive garbage in order to meet the length requirements. This, like many other Netflix documentaries, stretched out a simple story into a multi-part series. Come on, it's beyond time that we bring back the hour/hour-and-half documentary.

We weren't planning to watch this three-part docu-series, but a few extra hours the other day and a fetid curiosity led us astray and we binged it in one sitting. Once again, I'll save you the time and unless you really care about a skeezy website that helps people have affairs, there isn't much there there. I'd heard about the major hack, but knew (or cared) little about it and after watching this show, I didn't feel much sympathy for the people whose names were leaked. However, the show did raise an interesting point about the people who dove into the data and made it more easily accessible. As we continue to see, vigilante internet mobs can be dangerous, with their self-righteousness and certitude. The most empathetic character was the wife of the pastor who killed himself after his name appeared in the leak, and the least interesting (and annoying) had to be the nauseating Christian influencer couple who took up the most screen time. I needed a shower after watching this and am convinced Noel Biderman is one of the more despicable and poisonous pied pipers in the business world.

This documentary has a lot of excuses and rationalizing for why it's ok for cheaters to deceive and betray their partner's trust. For the record, it's not just religious people who think infidelity is wrong and immoral.

The CEO, who only appears in clips, seems like the biggest sleazebag.

As for the Christian couple, they're attention seeking phonies and probably only agreed to be in the documentary because they're clearly addicted to views. Everything they said felt inauthentic and just an excuse to have screen time.

Overall, the story is interesting, particularly the hacking, but this definitely didn't need to be three episodes. Even two is pushing it.

This is interesting as this happened in the age where no one knew the impact of cyber attacks. This is similar to all dating websites these days. Documentry is well made and directed except the couple who look like they are just there to promote their youtube channel and flaunt fake love. I just ended up skipping all their interviews and scenes. The documentary focuses less on cyber attack but more on this couple. It's almost as if they invested their own money on this documentary. May be they did invest money and if they did then it is justified that they get so much footage out of it. Anyway, i did watch it at 1.5 speed.

Of the handful of the people they profiled, I.e. Christian guy, suicide guy, etc they all took ridiculous selfie / regular photos with really stupid looks on their faces, like they were always trying to be funny....

I believe that anyone who constantly takes pics like this are liars who are hiding something. I'll admit this is a far fetched theory but I've notice this in other documentaries also. A real man doesn't do this. So take a look at your significant others social media and also the photos around your house. You might be married to one of these unfaithful idiots and you didn't even know it.