Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story

In the third and final episode the narrator and investigative reporter, Ms Scaachi Koul reveals that when she told people she had interviewed Joseph Francis on the subject of his once mighty Girls Gone Wild empire, she says the reaction was generally, oh yeah I have a vague recollection of all that. That is exactly what I thought when "Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story" was released on Peacock!

Interesting story of how high school AV club nobody Francis rises to softcore(mostly) porn video tape impresario and multimillionaire. But this is just the peamble.

"Girls Gone Wild: The Untold Story" is a well done mix of: The producers boiling down nine hours worth of Koul-Francis one-on-one conversations; interviews with several girls coerced into flashing their boobs while inebrieated on spring break for peanuts (a GGW T-shirt and/or a couple hundred dollars) and the negative impact it has has on their lives; and discussions with former GGW camera men(yes, surprise, all behind the cameras are men) and other GGW employees. This paints a vivid (and I must say entertaining) picture of Joseph Francis as one hell of a misogynistic sleaze bag.

Also, included is some opining of GGW's impact on overall society in general. To this reviewer, this is not definitive, but should be left to the audience, to mull over and agree or disagree.

Finally, to my surprise, no mention is made of Snoop Dogg, and his involvement both as pitchman on GGW infomercials, and host on at least one of the tapes.

I'm literally asking because I couldn't hear a large portion of it. The sound engineer and QC needs to be fired. Often times the music is so loud that you can't hear the person being interviewed. Thus creating a huge problem of trying to follow what should be the simplest of stories.

Unfortunately, I'm in no position to commend on the meat of the documentary as I couldn't hear a lot of it and I did not finish it due to this. It's very annoying.

I cannot recommend watching this title unless yo my want to turn on the subtitles and read it (which is not what I had in my for today).

It bums me out cause I was one of those kids that saw these late night infomercials and it was a huge filters phenomenon at the time but I guess I'll never know what happened 🤷‍♂️

I thought it was a good documentary, although I do agree with most of what has been said in the previous reviews. I also did not feel sorry for these girls I'm sorry, I just don't. Anybody that has been drunk before knows that we all probably do things will regret the next day and we have nobody to blame but ourselves if we put ourselves in those situations. That's part of growing up and for them, they had to learn this the hard way. I do have sympathy for the reporter that was assaulted, that was wrong. And he definitely should have been carding girls from the very beginning but the girls did lie on camera about their age so that's more their fault.

Synopsis - Women are baring their breasts for the camera. Joe sees an opportunity to profit from this and subsequently makes a lot of money. I'm not going to defend any of the criminal acts that may have been committed, but it seems the majority of the women have a moment of clarity after the fact.

This could have easily been a 30 minute episode on Dateline or something similar. Why this material was expounded to 3 hour docuseries is quite perplexing. Who approved the audio mix for the final edit? To say it is subpar doesn't really do it justice. The background audio should never overpower the dialogue from your subject!!!

I gave up after the first episode and hope you will do the same. Read the Wikipedia article with a fireplace stream in the background. You'll save time and have a much more pleasant experience.

Do better next time Peacock.

As someone who didn't know much about GGW, I'm really curious around the conversation of shaping TV and porn today. Really fascinating. I think the filmmakers do a great job of portraying the negative side of this otherwise "consensual" fad, and how the exploitation of women can be skinned as empowerment. The line that stuck with me was pointing out that women might have been given confidence, but they were certainly not empowered / given power.

I agree the filmmakers are not very neutral but I think the whole damn point of this show is that we all KNOW the consensual side, of women who want to be taped. Let's talk about the coercion and criminal side.

Some reviews point out the sound mix - make sure the audio is set to STEREO not 5.1 in the Peacock app. It looks like they fixed the default but just in case you have this issue too...