Ashley Madison: Sexo, Mentiras e Escândalo

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.

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.

It was an interesting premise. I enjoyed hearing the story of how Ashley Madison began and how they marketed the website. However, they took an idea that had enough content for a 1-1.5 hour tv special and turned it into three separate hour long episodes. It was very bloated and repetitive in a lot of places. The personal stories of the interviewees were also drawn out. The show did have some interesting facts and perspectives within it and it was well put together. However, I found myself skipping a number of interviews and scenes because of how repetitive it was. You're probably better just googling the story rather than watching this show.

In the early 2000's, when online dating was still relatively taboo, one firm took the monotony out of monogamy, Ashley Madison, unfortunately for the company and users, the site was hacked, and details made public.

Ok, so it's not exactly enlightening or educational, it's the kind of series you'll watch as you have tea and toast, whilst reading your newspaper, what it is, is an interesting story about human behaviour.

You will hear from hypocrites, more hypocrites, and a few people who very much have their feet on the ground.

I had a few questions, who did it, what would the fallout be, and would she stay with him?

You get some answers, unfortunately not all of them, but it's worth sticking with, episodes two and three are a lot more satisfying.

I wish Netflix would take note of so many comments, focused on the same thing, stop making your documentaries so long, this is yet another example, part one is virtually redundant, it establishes one thing, people cheat.

7/10.

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.