Baby Reindeer is a viral word-of-mouth hit of a kind we’ve not seen in ages, but it has finally been dethroned. There’s a new Netflix number one.
It’s Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal, a documentary series about a dating site you may well have vague memories of.
Back in 2015, Ashley Madison was hacked, implicating the user data of more than 30 million people. It was a big story.
That would be bad enough for any entity, but Ashley Madison was (and is) a platform made for people who want to have extramarital affairs. “Life is short. Have an affair,” the front page of its website still reads in 2024.
Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal is a 3-part series that takes us through the site’s story, from the very beginning. It launched in 2002, making it far older than Tinder — a whole decade, in fact, as that big name arrived in 2012.
The documentary talks to people who had their lives upturned after their details were uncovered and published online by a hacker group.
Yup, there were celebrities and regular folk alike in this massive data breach, undertaken by a group calling itself The Impact Team.
One of the key interviewees in the show is Sam Rader, a popular Christian family vlogger on YouTube.
We don’t actually get to the real meat of the hack until the second episode in Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal. And the show also looks into how Ashley Madison became an early cautionary tale about cybersecurity and even the prevalence of bots on social media.
Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal is directed by Toby Paton, who also worked on The Brexit Storm: Laura Kuenssberg’s Inside Story and Max Clifford: The Fall of A Tabloid King.
Episodes run from 49-53 minutes a piece. The show is currently the number one Netflix show in 30 countries, according to Flixpatrol, including the UK and US.
