The Ashley Madison Affair on Hulu

If there was ever a time that adultery was trendy; it would be the time of the heyday of extra-marital affair dating site Ashley Madison. The site that started in 2001, and is still operational today, despite the setbacks of a 2015 cyber hack that ruined lives, was the place to go before Tinder for discrete hookups outside of your marriage. In a new three-part Hulu Original Series done by ABC News Studios, we are exposed to the history of the site from its meager beginnings to rise to infamy and the events surrounding a cyber security hack that most assumed would play the part of its demise.

The ads were everywhere, and it wasn’t just on late-night television with the campy PG-13 or R rated movies they used to show on the USA Network “Up All Night” programming. You may remember the kind of ads you would see in commercial breaks for the program would involve steamy 900 numbers that lonely hearts could call for a little extra attention all for 99 cents a minute. Ashley Madison bridged the gap between pretend and “in real life” and had a more mainstream approach to its ad campaign that involved not just television ads, but the likes of billboards and newspaper ads.

I liked how the documentary spent a good amount of time detailing the site’s rise to fame and how the very meticulous marketing campaigns played a part in that rise to fame. It detailed several moments where Ashley Madison would use the infidelity of public figures as fodder that was amounted to a naughty “you should have had a V8” moment.

An interesting concept used in documentary was the use of actors to stand in as storytellers for people’s personal experiences using the website. Since there were people in the piece as themselves, telling their own stories, I am not sure the idea of having actor’s portrayals of people really served no other purpose than to pad the content of the film. I can understand why some people would not want to show themselves, but still want to tell their own story. However, this decision on the part of the filmmakers, and how they were presented in a way that seemed “gossipy”, seems to only work against the true upfront narratives presented in the program.

Regardless of this, the three-part documentary series presents a veritable timeline of events that include the 2015 hack of the site by a hacker known as “Impact Team” that not only exposed users on the site and all their known information, but also to the two other major lynchpins of cyber attack checkmate.

Those two items included the fact that at a point prior to the hack that Ashley Madison was creating and using fake women profiles to deceive male users to defraud them of money, and the proof that the (now former) CEO of the company was engaging in extra-marital affairs as well. The latter would seem like just another day at the office for CEO Noel Biderman; except for the fact that he often went on television interviews with his wife claiming that he had a wonderful marriage and was faithful to his wife.

The bulk of the program was having to do with the hack and the aftermath, which producers of the show might have taken too much time describing the aftereffects of the hack, and not enough time diving into the investigation of the hacktivist team that seemed to consider this moment as a moral obligation to expose the truth.

I was able to breeze through the three parts of this documentary with ease, and despite any concerns I had about it that I mentioned here, I found it informative and entertaining. If you want to jump down the rabbit hole of Ashley Madison, I suggest checking out The Ashley Madison Affair streaming now exclusively on the Hulu app.