George Santos and the Art of the Scam

In the weeks since George Santos was expelled from Congress, his story has been funnelled straight into the entertainment pipeline, from a memorable sketch on “Saturday Night Live” and reports of a film in the works at HBO to his own exploits on Cameo, where he’s charging five hundred dollars apiece for personalized video messages. On this episode of Critics at Large, the staff writers Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz assess why Santos’s story resonates with audiences, and the enduring appeal of the scammer narrative, from Herman Melville’s “The Confidence-Man” to Meredith Wilson’s “The Music Man.” Scammers embody—and exploit—a central tenet of the American Dream: the promise of a brighter future awaiting those audacious enough to reach for it. But their stories can also expose the weaknesses at the heart of our institutions. Why, then, do we keep coming back for more? “The level of enjoyment that we gain from these depictions of scams doesn’t mean that the critique isn’t there,” Fry says. “It’s almost like we as audiences are also begging, ‘Please make this fun for us.’ ”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Every Day’s a Holiday” (1937)
“Inventing Anna” (2022)
“Telemarketers” (2023)
“The Confidence-Man,” by Herman Melville
“The Dropout” (2022)
“The Fabulist,” by Mark Chiusano
“The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley” (2019)
“The Music Man” (1957)
“The Postman Always Rings Twice” (1946)
The “Simpsons” episode “Marge vs. the Monorail” (1993)
“The Wolf of Wall Street” (2013)
“Trafficked With Mariana van Zeller” (2020 – present)

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