The Ashley Madison Affair

It is compulsive viewing. Do not start watching it if you don’t want to watch the whole thing.

“The Ashley Madison Affair” has a bit of a low-rent look and perhaps that’s a deliberate choice given the material. Director Johanna Hamilton utilizes archival footage, interviews with tech journalists and ABC News contributor Sunny Hostin and Ashley Madison Chief Strategy Officer Paul Keable, conversations with real-life folks whose lives were deeply impacted by the site, and also sprinkles in “interviews” with actors who quote actual Ashley Madison users. (That latter technique could have come across as cheesy, but the actors are actually quite good and natural.)

The Ashley Madison Affair is a well-paced docuseries that takes enough of a jaundiced eye at Ashley Madison to show its rise and fall in the correct context.

Interviews with clients and with the journalists and security experts who broke and covered the story provide further context, although the docuseries presents nothing particularly explosive that hasn’t already been reported elsewhere.