stanchevamilena
Opinion based on episode 1: While the topic is interesting and relevant, this film presents it in a completely one sided view - European car makers. What about all the rest of the car makers, especially the American ones? It seems like this "documentary" has a very clear agenda to harm the European car makers. They bring in Hitler, they talk about polluted air in kindergartens and how European car manufacturers cause deaths (like the Americans and others don't?) - all the classical elements of a negative propaganda. Disappointed in Netflix for allowing to show such biased views.
ldrafey
Among the best documentaries I've seen over the past decade! Still have only viewed the first few but they are any example, I won't be viewing elsewhere until I have completed the series.
I odn't think it will spoil potential viewer's interest to say that the documentary series details inside stories, deep background, documents and interviews of participants on all sides of issues, including the VW scandal, the Payday Loan lenders and so forth. The actual mechanisms that occurred to create the scandalous activities and the enormous energy, complexity and serious funding of the subsequent cover ups are extraordinary and reveal far more than was publicly rendered at the time. How the Payday Loans enabled their CEOs to trample over and utterly destroy the lives of literally thousands of innocent people, all of whom had paid off their loans, only to discover that the payments were being diverted elsewhere and the loans were being continued at ever higher interest rates. I was unable to shed tears when the CEO in charge made virtually the same complaints as his thousands of victims but blamed the government for his ensuing legal and personal problems.
The interesting point that I have been forced to consider so far is the denial factor. Denial seems to act like some kind of impenetrable force field, disabling the culprit's (as well as their co-workers, friend's and family member's) ability to comprehend the extraordinary damage they caused, using the weakest and most skewed form of reasoning to form excuses and to say things like "it was just business" ... like "just following orders". We were all so sickened as we witnessed the horrors and ravages perpetrated by the Pay Day folks that we ended up staying up all night trying to make sense of how anyone could possibly defend such actions. I can't say enough how truly fascinating it is to learn the details behind these scandals as well as their ultimate effect on political retaliation taken in 2017 against the same government regulations that had been put into place to successfully stem these activities and had ultimately protected so many citizens not to mention the reaction of the current administration favoring the kind of sick activities perpetrated by these monsters, once more unleashing the horrors that our society had finally managed to rid itself of.
The Docs are entirely unbiased and professionally executed, leaving nothing to the imagination other than, perhaps, a consideration of how it is that perfectly ordinary people with otherwise good intentions managed to end up lying to themselves and to create a kind of universal state of deception cloaked in a kind of self-congratulatory goodness and how the ignorance of the masses enabled them to fool so many people, desperate for products that really work, that function as they ought; that don't risk the lives of the users; for a bit of good will to help them out during desperate times, for policies that enable citizens to get on with their productive llives without having to fear the predatory politician or the neighbor next door. This series is education on steroids! A must see for all age groups whose lives are primarily about treading water in this world controlled by wholesale greed, ignorance and insensitivity.
