Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal

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.

This series show how a website exploited married people who wanted to cheat on their spouses without getting caught.

What is truly amazing is the sheer number: at one point, 37 millions subscribers !

Also some of the characters are presented as actually very good people. One is a Christian who really loved his wife and kids. Another one is a respected minister in a church.

However, what is unbelievable is that these millions of people gladly gave all their most private information and trusted the website to protect their privacy.

I watched the whole 3 episodes in one sitting.

I thought it was well put together by Netflix.

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.

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.

No matter how interesting the subject matter may be, this "series" is biased beyond belief. At first I almost couldn't believe that the victims of this doc were the unfaithful partners, it just seemed insane. But yes, we were expected to watch the cheaters explain their stories as if they are recounting traumatic events and feel sorry for them.

The "victims" paint themselves as naive and discontent partners tricked into doing something stupid (not immoral, just stupid) who then faced unfair consequences.

It's quite rich that the filmmakers have people in the doc explaining how the hack ruined so many lives, and yet don't see the hypocrisy that they are defending those guilty of infidelity, which undoubtedly ruins lives. They want us to be scared of the group responsible for the hack, but I think they should be seen as America's most noble whistleblowers.