ELLIOT (V.O.)

I’m good at reading people. My secret? I look for the worst in them.

—MR. ROBOT
BY WRITER/CREATOR/SHOWRUNNER/DIRECTOR
SAM ESMAIL

Chapter 3

Trust Me

The Long Con On-Demand—From The Riches to Sneaky Pete, Patriot, The Americans and More

In her book The Confidence Game: Why We Fall for It … Every Time,¹ Maria Konnikova, a psychologist and contributor to The New Yorker, makes the overarching point about the dark art of the scam: People are instinctively trusting. “Size someone up well, and you can sell them anything.” It’s as true of the storefront psychic who takes advantage of the gullible (Shut Eye on Hulu) as of the cult leader who exploits lost souls (The Path, also on Hulu).

The truth is, we all lie, in one form or another, every day. It’s social currency to gain advantage. Flattery may not get you everywhere, but it certainly helps—if it sounds sincere and convincing. “Does this dress make me look fat?” The answer, no matter what the situation, should always be an emphatic “no.” As Konnikova puts it, “Con artists, in some sense, merely take our regular white lies to the next level.” And in today’s political climate, facts are met with skepticism anyway.

Con artists thrive in times of social and political instability, making it easier for emotion to trump reason (no pun intended). The Internet has also provided scammers easy access to our personal information to forge false identities. Konnikova uses a smart, helpful lexicon for grifters, helpful to our analysis:

Legendary playwright John Guare wrote about an elaborate con (based on a true story) perpetrated on a wealthy Manhattan couple in his masterpiece Six Degrees of Separation. In the Tony- and Pulitzer Prize-winning play and subsequent movie adaptation, Ouisa and Flanders Kittredge are conned by a young African-American man who they’re convinced is a college friend of one of their (estranged, entitled) children; he shows up at their Upper East Side apartment in turmoil, having just been mugged and stabbed in Central Park. He tells them his name is Paul Poitier and that he’s the son of the iconic movie star Sidney Poitier. Unfortunately, none of it is true; Paul stabbed himself in the abdomen, and Sidney Poitier only has daughters.

So why did these cynical New Yorkers buy into this fiction? Two reasons: “Paul” tells them his dad is in town to discuss directing the movie version of Cats! And that he may be so inclined to grant Ouisa and Paul the chance to be in it as extras! So the Kittredges are simultaneously star struck and stage struck. They accept this imposter into their lives because they’re not so cynical after all; they still have dreams. They accept him because—despite their wealth (or, as Ouisa tells Paul, “Nobody’s rich. We’re just hand-to-mouth on a higher plateau”)—they want him (and their children) to accept them. This example is, sadly, the very definition of “confirmation bias.”

A good, juicy story provides the key to the long con, during the course of which the mark finds a way to rationalize or ignore warning signs and red flags. The long con keeps the mark’s eyes focused on some kind of promise or desired outcome; that’s the shiny object—the dangling carrot—that often overrules objectivity and common sense. In film noir, such as Billy Wilder’s classic Double Indemnity,² the femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) uses the fine art of seduction as the carrot to persuade her unwitting mark, Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), to kill her husband.

Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train, Lawrence Kasdan’s Body Heat, Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige and Martin Scorsese’s Catch Me If You Can play by the same deceitful rules. In each case it should be noted that both grifter/seducer and mark/dupe need to characterize themselves as trapped by their limited, unsatisfying and/or untenable circumstances—with the long con their only way out.

A short transactional con is, by design, fast and efficient. “Never give a hot mooch time to cool off,” Konnikova quotes one grifter saying, “You want to close him while he is still slobbering with greed.” It’s the irresistibly drawn-out slow-burn: the strategic long con that can last a full TV season or encompass multiple seasons. As viewers, we too buy into a great compelling story; we’re the willing marks, ready to suspend our disbelief if it promises a surprising, satisfying outcome. On TV, we tune in to have our expectations debunked; we want to be wrong, or else the ending of the episode or season is predictable and unsatisfying. If the climax delivers the truth, then we want the truth, but we want the characters to work hard to uncover it. In dramatic storytelling, truth must be proactively earned.

Pulling off a long con requires patience, resourcefulness and the ability to talk and spin one’s way out of trouble. The long con only sustains when doubters are turned into believers and the skeptical naysayers are discredited (or killed off). One of my favorite movies of all time is the 1973 masterpiece The Sting written by David S. Ward, starring Paul Newman and Robert Redford as Henry Gondorff and Johnny Hooker, respectively. Primarily set in 1936 Chicago, Hooker starts off as a small-time con man seeking revenge for the murder of his former partner in crime; he needs the renowned but now washed-up Gondorff to come out of retirement for one last big score. A rigged poker game on a fancy train car sets up their smarmy mark: a wealthy Chicago banker/mobster, Doyle Lonnegan (Robert Shaw). This smaller-stakes con ropes Lonnegan in and makes him feel confident that he’s the one with the upper hand. Unfortunately for the villainous Lonnegan, not only are Gondorff and Hooker playing him, they’ve assembled an entire team of role players to “sell” their bogus horse-racing bookie operation—a scheme as well-planned, comedic and intricate as Ocean’s Eleven and Argo. It’s not a coincidence that the indelible piano score from The Sting is Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.”

The popular and critical success of this Academy Award-winning film is largely attributed to the ending, when the audience is just as stunned by the “sting” as Lonnegan is. Like all successful cons, we should see it coming, but we don’t. We’re blindsided. The movie, and all of the following examples from TV series, also pull off another hard-to-perform trick on the audience: We’re rooting for the deceivers, criminals, spies and grifters. For as slippery as they are, their targets are almost always far worse. Just as Dexter was a vigilante serial killer, our con men and women have good intentions. Or if “good” sounds simplistic, then their motives live in the morally gray area where the end justifies the means.

What’s key in each case is that we empathize and/or sympathize with the plight of the scammer/criminal as antihero; they do bad things for good reasons. The grifter as underdog, placed between two wrongs, is the ultimate survivor. And we find ourselves roped in to this protagonist’s quest by the end of the pilot episode. His or her plight seems reasonable and necessary. In real life, we like to believe that cheaters never prosper, but on TV, they sure have a whole lot of fun. It might not end well, and on the shows with life-and-death stakes, our protagonist can find him/herself up shit creek, incurring the wrath of the antagonist. The smart money is on the scammer. But on the crime drama or espionage thriller TV series, when the stakes are higher, the body count throws off the bottom line of the win. No one walks away unscathed. Long-con TV series are all about close calls, collateral damage and getting out alive or with a modicum of one’s dignity intact. Laws are broken, and rules are circumvented in service of the long con. But no matter how hard the “bad” guys play and how well they plan, Murphy’s Law prevails.

There have been many memorable TV series that service the scam-of-the-week format, from Mission: Impossible to Charlie’s Angels and Leverage. But the groundbreaking, ahead-of-its time Profit on Fox, canceled after just four episodes, was a precursor to the trend of edgy, dark dramas featuring morally challenged protagonists that would follow, including The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Shield and Breaking Bad. The first long-con TV series on my personal radar was the wry, subversive, criminally under-appreciated FX series The Riches, created by Dmitry Lipkin and starring Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver. The one-hour dramedy that ran from 2007–2008 was set in an upscale, gated community in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. In the pilot, written by Lipkin and Izzard, Dahlia Malloy (Driver) is paroled from prison—but immediately finds herself on the run with her Irish “traveler” con artist family—who are escaping their relatives after avoiding an arranged marriage for their daughter and absconding with the clan’s life savings. On the road in their RV, Dahlia, her husband Wayne (Izzard) and their three kids find themselves in a high-speed game of chicken with a rival traveler family … that leads to a collision with a wealthy family, the Riches, on a quiet road.

It’s a tragic accident that leaves all the Riches dead. Ready to cut and run, Wayne convinces Dahlia that this could be their destiny—and the premise of the series—which sets up the long con: What if you could steal the identity of an entire, privileged family? Could you effectively impersonate them, move into their house and even assume their roles in the workplace and community? And because we can’t have a great, juicy con story without the downside of getting caught, there must be potential consequences, a/k/a stakes.

For impersonating the Riches, the stakes for Wayne and ex-con Dahlia are prison and even death. Once they move into the affluent Riches’ residence, not erasing but replacing them, they struggle to adjust to their new lives as “buffers,” as they call people who are not travelers. These are nomadic swindlers, part of a much larger clan throughout the ages.

The digital television revolution has ushered in season-long, binge-worthy, serialized procedurals: the slow-burn mystery, in which truth is subverted, buried or obscured. Now that viewers can watch what they want, when they want, on-demand, the long-con, one-hour drama, half-hour dramedy or comedy and limited series are all natural extensions of this welcomed trend, as we witness marks being set up, roped in, played and blown off, one TV season at a time.

Here’s my run-down on some of the best long-con series out there and what we can learn from them.

The Masquerade: Sneaky Pete

Sneaky Pete, created and executive produced by showrunner David Shore (House) and Bryan Cranston (yes, Walter White from Breaking Bad), demonstrates how season-long mysteries, or “cons” in this case, can be pieced together episode to episode. Each installment of Sneaky Pete features small scams and tricks by a cast of confidence men that build on the bigger, season-long scam of “The Turk.” We as the audience don’t know what “The Turk” will end up being or accomplishing, we just know that Marius must execute the scam to help his brother and avenge the death of a fallen friend. Add to that slow-burn the stream of scams, mysteries and investigations Audrey and Julia participate in as part of their bail bonds business, and viewers are given scenes rife with deception and intrigue. The sweet spot of the show focuses on Marius’ skill as a confidence man. Seeing him slowly build to one major job allows us to piece together the puzzle as we watch.

The Period Political Masquerade: The Americans

For example: At the start of the series Philip has assumed the identity of “Clark Westerfeld” to get close to and eventually marry the secretary to an FBI department head, Martha Hanson (Alison Wright). A secondary long con is that Elizabeth and Philip had two kids, Paige (Holly Taylor) and Henry (Keidrich Sellati), during their deep-cover, sham marriage—but their own children don’t even know their parents are KGB spies for several seasons. Elizabeth and Philip have bogus day jobs and must con their colleagues at the travel agency. They must also keep up appearances to their neighbors across the street, Stan and Sandra Beeman (Noah Emmerich and Susan Misner).

As viewers watch Elizabeth and Philip reluctantly allow more people into their lives and in turn trick more and more into thinking they’re not stealing weapons plans or assassinating people in the middle of the night, the deeper their lie goes. The added layer that Elizabeth and Philip were strangers, paired together to become lifelong spy partners, means they’re constantly looking over their shoulders at each other. After all, once you’ve seen your “husband” make another woman believe he’s someone else and get her to marry him, how could you trust him? (Tellingly, Philip says “I love you” to Elizabeth only once onscreen, in Season 4, Episode 7.) KGB propaganda is another long con, with Philip and Elizabeth deeply divided on their allegiance to the USSR. Philip continues to question their mission, while Elizabeth has complete devotion to the Motherland. Creator and former CIA officer Joseph Weisberg’s focus on the gray areas makes the show consistently powerful. Writing in the gray areas will similarly strengthen our own long-con pilots.

Entrapment and Reversals: The Night Manager

(limited series; drama/espionage thriller)

In The Night Manager, an award-winning, six-part mini-series written by David Farr and based on the John LeCarré novel, Jonathan Pine is the seemingly humble, solicitous night manager of a luxury hotel in Cairo. His helpful attitude, especially with beautiful women, gets him caught up in an illegal weapons trade business being conducted by the über-evil arms dealer Richard Roper. Soon Pine finds himself in possession of confidential documents, which he turns in to the International Enforcement Agency in London. A few years later, Pine has relocated to a hotel in Switzerland; it’s revealed that he is a former British soldier whose résumé includes a tour of Iraq. Angela Burr, an intelligence officer who’s investigating Roper, talks him into working for her. While trying to infiltrate Roper’s organization, Pine is seduced by Roper’s girlfriend Jed (Elizabeth Debicki) while trying to steer clear of Roper’s suspicious associate, Corky. Meanwhile Burr is trying her best to keep the whole operation secret from parts of MI6 (the British CIA) for fear of being shut down. Ultimately Pine and Burr catch Roper, along with the MI6 agents who have betrayed their country by working with him. As writers, keeping our audience guessing with setups, reversals and payoffs makes for edge-of-the-seat viewing.

All Is Not What It Seems: The Good Place

(half-hour comedy)

Created and executive produced by veteran comedy writer Michael Schur (The Office, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine), The Good Place has one of the most Earth-shattering twists I’ve experienced in its finale. The central mystery of the show logically never changes—we are always wondering what’s going on in The Good Place. But when Eleanor realizes that this isn’t The Good Place at all, but rather a creative new way to punish humans for all of eternity (i.e., hell), the slate is immediately wiped clean. It shows how much the POV has to do with a show’s ability to align the viewers with a character and their goals. Throughout the whole first season, viewers are focused on Eleanor’s hiding of her true, non-heaven-worthy personality and whether or not she’ll get caught—no one ever considers what Michael is up to behind the scenes. Flashbacks in the finale show us Michael’s Machiavellian side as he sets up most of the drama from previous episodes. This is also a testament to Ted Danson’s comedic ability; he can pivot his character from benevolent to goofy to a malicious demon without breaking a sweat. Twists and turns are valuable currency when writing a long-con series, such as the big reveal about the Bad Place in the Season 1 finale.

The Farce Thriller: Patriot

(one-hour dark comedy)

John’s brother, Edward (Michael Chernus) participates in the con, assuming the role of a bogus “official Attaché” (replete with fake badge) and from the shadows helps his brother get out of close calls and tough scrapes. The initial mission goes terribly wrong when John loses a bag loaded with $10 million in cash at Luxembourg Airport, which turns out to be stolen by a corrupt baggage handler. In trying to retrieve the money, John (who also happens to be a trained assassin) gets into a violent confrontation with an angry mob of Brazilian wrestlers, leaving one of them dead and prompting an investigation.

The life-and-death stakes at the center of the plot are the touchstones of an espionage thriller. But creator/showrunner Steven Conrad (The Pursuit of Happyness, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty, The Weatherman) has delivered not only a thriller, but an inspired farce. John is a heavily flawed antihero. After accidentally killing a male hotel maid on a botched mission, John begins to suffer from undiagnosed PTSD. He’s ruthlessly tough on the outside but quietly unraveling on the inside. What makes him such a great, iconic character is how his repressed rage (at his father), unresolved marital issues and PTSD come out in the form of folk songs. Have guitar, will travel: John Tavner croons his tales of woe out in public squares in Amsterdam and via open mic nights at local pubs in Luxembourg.

John is a loose cannon: aloof, emotionally bereft and as bemused as he is cunning. His eager-to-please elder brother Edward provides comic relief and is John’s polar opposite (and he has a suspicious, controlling wife, in contrast to John’s permissive, trusting spouse). One of Edward’s functions is to prevent John from self-destructively outing himself as a deep-cover spy.

Conrad places a fresh spin on the imposter/spy/long-con game by giving us a glimpse into the CIA’s NOC operation. But there’s a deeper long con at play within the Tavner family. From its title, Patriot—Latin root “pater” translating to “father”—to its distinctive, evocative title sequence (and that music!), with its images depicting classic American masculinity (boys roughhousing, dirt bikes, playing with guns), the true long con of this series is the father-son relationship. When I sat down with Steven Conrad over (what else?) beers, he shared with me the rich subtext of his unique vision for the show.

To the audience, the subtext in their dysfunctional relationship gives John his humanity and provides our rooting interest and empathy for him to succeed. Patriot’s marketing campaign shows a befuddled John Tavner, with the tagline “Who Is John Lakeman?” It’s a wry nod to the first line of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged: “Who is John Gault?” And the honest answer from insecure confidence man John Tavner would most definitely be: “Hell if I know.”