Charlie was briefly the best out of the 11 million people who play Fantasy Premier League.

In the spring of 2009, Vice published a blog post, notorious even by its own standards, titled “Department of Oopsies!—We Hired a Grifter.” An employee had started chatting with the magazine’s new executive assistant, Kari Ferrell; after she reportedly began coming on to him over instant messages, he Googled her, only to find out that she was on the Salt Lake City Police Department’s most-wanted list. Instead of simply firing Ferrell, Vice outed her online, confessing that it probably should have done a cursory search before hiring someone with “less-than-desirable traits, like, say, five outstanding warrants for fraud.” Oopsie! Read it now and you might find the post unrepentantly confessional in a prescient kind of way, anticipating a future in which any sin or failure can be transfigurated as long as it makes for good-enough content.

Which is to say: The fact that only now is Ferrell profiting from her own story illustrates how innocent—easily shocked, even—we once were, and what brazen shamelessness we’ve since come to accept as normal. In 2009, Ferrell’s unfortunate tendency toward pathological lying and light theft made her the internet’s main character for weeks on end. She was fodder for countless Gawker updates and a detailed profile in The Observer titled “The Hipster Grifter” before she ended up serving time in jail and changing her name to evade her past. Conversely, consider Billy McFarland of Fyre Festival fame, sentenced to prison in 2018 for defrauding investors of more than $26 million, who, during the 2024 presidential campaign, served as a conduit between rappers and Donald Trump. Or Anna Delvey, convicted in 2019 for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars while posing as an art-world heiress, who, since her jail stint, has gained more than 1 million Instagram followers and drew attention for a recent appearance on Dancing With the Stars in which her court-mandated ankle bracelet featured prominently.

[Read: The scams are winning]

You can understand why Ferrell might think it’s well past time for a comeback. Her new memoir, You’ll Never Believe Me, is subtitled A Life of Lies, Second Tries, and Things I Should Only Tell My Therapist, as if to sublimate the unreliability of its narrator into an honest and unfiltered account. And, for the most part, it works. Ferrell is, as she herself confesses, a gifted communicator and manipulator of words, charming and garrulous and breezily intimate. Her story is compelling by any standard. She tells us she still doesn’t know exactly why she did what she did: tricking her closest friends into cashing bad checks, leaving one on the hook for thousands in bail fees; lying about having terminal cancer; seducing easy marks by writing them notes in which she invited them to “throw a hot dog down my hall.” (Her Instagram handle is still “hotdoghandjobs.”) But she is at least willing to consider the question—which these days is perhaps as much as we can ask for.

New York, in the spring of 2009, was still reeling from the financial crisis, which had revealed profiteering and scammery to be essential American traditions. The implosion of the global economy had fostered a kind of hedonistic nihilism among many recent graduates, which Ferrell worked to her (minimal, it turned out) advantage. But there also just wasn’t that much happening online yet—it was the era after Myspace had normalized online connection and before Instagram had turned creative self-branding into a viable career—which helps explain why the exposure of a very small-time Brooklyn grifter with a prominent chest tattoo fascinated people so much. After The Observer’s Doree Shafrir ran a lengthy feature on Ferrell, uncovering her history of conning her friends and lovers, she became an obsession at Gawker, Gothamist, and other New York–area publications. She was an origin story for an enduring generational cliché: the feckless, inked-up Millennial indulging in petty larceny and shameless self-mythologizing for avocado toast and a Viceland email address. (Remember Hannah Horvath on Girls, quietly filching the cash her parents had left for their hotel maid?)

Ferrell resists this kind of lazy stereotyping. She is, and has only ever been, she insists, entirely her own person. The early chapters of her memoir act as a kind of ABCs of scamming, trying to lightly analyze how she might have been led astray. Adopted from South Korea as a baby, she was raised lovingly by parents who did their best, recalling a home where household goods were often purchased on layaway. When Ferrell was 2, her parents became Mormon converts, packing their family up and moving to Salt Lake City. Ferrell credits Sunday services for providing her with what she describes as “a MasterClass in manipulation,” and a doctor who put her on a diet as a child for unintentionally teaching her to lie (to her parents, about what she’d eaten that day). She writes that, as a teenager, she shoplifted with enthusiasm from big-box stores, as did her friends, but also had a gun drawn on her once for stealing a Sidekick from an acquaintance’s little sister.

With regard to her first con, which she orchestrated in Utah when she was 18, Ferrell writes, “It all sort of happened.” The mark was Charlie, her “brilliant, emotionally mature … caring, and trusting” boyfriend at the time; the scam was to get him to cash a check from her at his bank and pass her the funds (which she didn’t have in her account). That was it. After scoring her first $500 from Charlie, Ferrell repeated the scheme with other friends and acquaintances, sometimes ripping off new people to pay back the old ones when the checks bounced. “I didn’t steal money for drugs,” she writes. “I stole money in hopes that people wouldn’t forget me.” I’m not a therapist, but it’s hard not to psychoanalyze Ferrell’s behavior: the need to feel loved and tended to, coupled with the compulsion to lie and steal, forcing the people closest to her to reject her in ways that would ultimately affirm her worldview. When she was arrested for check fraud, identity fraud, and forgery, she marveled at how flattering her mug shot was and wondered whether she could buy it as a high-res print. She then persuaded another friend to pay her bail, before skipping town when a group of her victims banged on her door demanding their money back.

[Read: Millennial burnout is being televised]

Ferrell fled Utah for New York, where she had dreams of working at Vice or some other idealized cult brand. At first, she wanted to turn over a new leaf. But, she writes somewhat unconvincingly, she “grappled with how to be good in a world that punishes kind people. Mr. Rogers always said to ‘look for the helpers’ in times of turmoil, but whenever I found them they’d be getting kicked in the face by a richer, more ambitious person in power.” Still, she insists, “I didn’t want to blame the world for the way I was.” She’d often laser in on men at parties and concerts, send them sexually aggressive notes, and then pinch whatever she could from them. She’d reportedly love-bomb friends with offers of VIP passes; if they proved resistant, she’d occasionally tell them she had terminal cancer or a psychotic ex-boyfriend who was threatening her, or that she was pregnant. (Not all of this is in the book—I’m relying on other sources.) “I could have gone anywhere to find my marks, but I liked to shit where I ate,” Ferrell writes. This was ultimately her downfall—when her mug shot first appeared online, it wasn’t hard for gossip bloggers to find people who knew her. Some even had Ferrell stories of their own.

A strong personal brand is helpful for a Millennial internet personality; it’s less so for a con artist. You might wonder why people got so caught up with what Ferrell was alleged to have done at the time, given the $1.3 trillion value of subprime loans in 2007, or the $18 billion lost in Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme before his arrest in 2008. But the reality is that money lost to institutions can feel depressingly clinical. The betrayal of being robbed by a friend, or a lover, or a hipster with a pixie cut who likes all the same music you do and signs her notes “Korean Abdul-Jabbar,” is different—more intimate, and much harder to anticipate. Combine this dynamic with revelations about Ferrell trying to scam for things as trivial as Flight of the Conchords DVDs and cab fare, and you have all the absurd, small-scale ingredients for a bona fide internet spectacle.

The title of Ferrell’s memoir is, if you recall, You’ll Never Believe Me, and we probably shouldn’t—there’s enough that she seems to omit, or gloss over, that her account is best taken as an interpretation of events rather than as historical record. But she’s commendable for the ways in which she does try to confess, reflect, self-analyze, adjudicate. Her inability to check her worst impulses seems to have caused her considerable pain, to the point that when she was finally arrested, she writes, she was smiling in the photos—“an expression of pure relief.” Of all the infamous, shameless scammers who emerged after her, none has tried as she has to wrestle with the need to cheat others and the psychology behind the art of the steal. For that, consider You’ll Never Believe Me a job worth waiting for.

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Welcome back to The Daily’s Sunday culture edition.

Few things are more satisfying than watching a show pull off a clever and high-octane episode. For those looking to revisit some greats, our writers and editors answer the question: What do you think is a perfect episode of TV?

The following contains spoilers for the episodes mentioned.

“The Panic in Central Park,” Girls (streaming on Max)

Maybe this is the former theater critic in me coming out, but the thing I love most is when a television series tells a complete story in miniature—a stand-alone short that puts a particular dynamic or relationship or cast member front and center. Girls, which revolves around four friends in New York City, has always been brilliant at this, and never more so than with “The Panic in Central Park,” a Marnie-centered episode that deals with the particular moment in young adulthood when fantasy becomes untenable.

“The Panic in Central Park,” like the best Girls episodes, is written by Lena Dunham and directed by Richard Shepard. It begins with Desi mournfully reproaching his “cruel” new wife, Marnie, for declining to go get a scone, ends with her asking for a divorce, and riffs on film history, romance, and codependency in between. The high-strung Marnie, out on a walk to clear her head, encounters her ex, Charlie, who’s almost unrecognizable. He whisks her away on a whirlwind New York City adventure involving a consigned red cocktail dress (Millennial Williamsburg’s answer to Pretty Woman), a fake identity, Italian food, a rowboat in Central Park, a robbery, and—finally—the revelation that Charlie is addicted to heroin. A sadder, wiser Marnie walks home barefoot, having accepted the idea that no one is going to save her. The episode is beautiful and incisive about the allure of the stories we wrap ourselves in and the power of shaking them off.

— Sophie Gilbert, staff writer

***

“If It Smells Like a Rat, Give It Cheese,” Survivor: Micronesia (streaming on Hulu and Paramount+)

If I could erase my brain in order to watch anything for the first time again, I would do it for the penultimate episode of Survivor: Micronesia. The 16th season of the reality game show is famously one of the best, and this episode is why. Watching it is like witnessing Alex Honnold climb El Capitan without ropes—except instead of sheer athleticism in the face of seemingly impossible odds, you’re seeing how master manipulators exploit social dynamics to get what they want. It’s the Olympics for those who prefer politics or gossip to sports.

People who haven’t watched Survivor often assume that it’s about “surviving” the wilderness, but it’s always primarily been about surviving human nature. Driven by power and social capital, the show has more in common with Game of Thrones than Naked and Afraid. Explaining exactly what happens in this episode would be like explaining an inside joke; you need to watch the whole season to get why it hits. Just know that it features Red Wedding–level of gameplay, setting the bar high for how far people will go to get ahead.

— Serena Dai, senior editor

***

“C**tgate,” Veep (streaming on Max)

Unlike a perfect movie, a perfect episode of television does not need to surprise you or make you cry. It just needs to move your beloved or loathed characters through the formula in an especially excellent way. But the element of surprise may be why I remember “C**tgate” so many years later. In this episode of Veep, Selina Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) orchestrates two tasks that are both impossibly monumental and petty. She has to decide if she is going to bail out a bank owned by her current boyfriend, and she must find out who on her staff called her a “cunt” so loudly in public that it was overheard by a reporter.

These interweaving plots alone would make a perfectly satisfying episode. What makes it golden are two of the funniest, most unexpected subplots in Veep’s run. One involves a focus group for the bumbling White House liaison Jonah Ryan, now running for Congress in New Hampshire, who is workshopping an ad. The second is a surprise announcement by Selina’s daughter, a recurring sad sack who can never get her mother’s attention. Guess who she’s dating?

— Hanna Rosin, senior editor

***

“Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” The X-Files (streaming on Hulu)

If you’re seeking out a perfect episode of TV, the richest cache to search is the “case of the week” entries of The X-Files. The show wove an elaborate arc about aliens on Earth but saved most of its best material for the smaller stuff. “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose,” written by Darin Morgan, is a gothic short story, following FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) as they investigate a murder with the help of a tetchy local psychic named Clyde Bruckman (Peter Boyle).

This being The X-Files, Mulder is immediately taken with Bruckman’s clairvoyance, while Scully is skeptical—but Morgan’s script resolves each of Bruckman’s predictions about the future in clever, tragicomic ways, reinforcing Mulder’s belief while also finding ways to affirm Scully’s cynicism. It’s funny, dark, and beautifully acted—particularly between Anderson and Boyle—with an elliptical plot structure that feels wonderfully complex even by today’s TV standards.

— David Sims, staff writer

***

“It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It,” Grey’s Anatomy (streaming on Netflix and Hulu)

I’ve previously written that after more than 20 seasons, it’s time for Grey’s Anatomy to come to an end. But in its early days, the series was responsible for some of the most memorable episodes of television: The second season’s two-part storyline, “It’s the End of the World” and “As We Know It,” demonstrated the show’s mix of humor and drama at its best.

Colloquially known as the “bomb in the body cavity” episodes, they tell the story of a patient who comes in with live ammunition in his chest. At the same time, the show’s powerhouse resident Dr. Miranda Bailey goes into labor, and two other characters perform surgery on her husband, who crashed his car on his way in. In the midst of some very suspenseful plotlines, the dialogue explores the relationships among, and vulnerabilities of, the characters in a beautifully human way. On a show that’s known for putting people in harm’s way, this pair of episodes focuses as much on the emotions as on the drama: the fear of losing someone you care about, and what it really means to be in love.

— Kate Guarino, supervisory senior associate editor

***

Season 2, Episode 10, The Mole (streaming on Netflix)

The Season 2 finale of Netflix’s reboot of The Mole is made perfect if you first watch all of the other episodes. The show’s formula is simple: 12 people collaborate on Indiana Jones–style missions to earn money for a prize pot, but one of them is a “mole” hired by the producers to sabotage the other contestants. Elimination isn’t based on your performance in missions. It’s about how accurately you identify the mole, according to your answers on a quiz given each round.

What results is sumptuous chaos, set among abandoned buildings and real explosives that make you wonder what the release form for this show must look like. Everyone is pretending to be the mole (to mislead others) while testing their fellow players (to figure out who the mole is) and still, somehow, trying to collect money for the prize pot. Oh, and did I mention that Ari Shapiro of All Things Considered fame is this season’s host?

I won’t spoil the finale, but it involves minefields and three equally mole-like characters. There’s not a single weak link in this episode, and if you correctly guess who the mole is, you’ll have bested much of the internet.

— Katherine Hu, assistant editor

***

“Chocolate With Nuts,” SpongeBob SquarePants (streaming on Paramount+)

At about 11 minutes per segment, SpongeBob SquarePants doesn’t have much room to play around with. But its best episodes use that brevity to their advantage, stuffing in visual gags, one-liners, callbacks, goofy voice acting, and witty repartee. “Chocolate With Nuts,” from the third season, is the greatest example of the show’s “run out the clock” ethos: SpongeBob and his best friend, Patrick, become chocolate-bar salesmen to achieve “fancy living.” Their ensuing door-to-door journey introduces them to a cavalcade of bizarre Bikini Bottom dwellers, including a seemingly immortal, shriveled-up fish and a man who feigns “glass bones” syndrome in one of many efforts to dupe the boys into buying chocolate from him instead.

More than most episodes of this kids’ cartoon, “Chocolate With Nuts” threads the needle between the juvenile hijinks and some more adult themes: the empty promise of the good life, the uphill battle of entrepreneurship, the fallacy of “trust thy neighbor.” That headiness is all conveyed through SpongeBob’s elastic face and Patrick’s gobsmacking vacuousness—the best way to explore any nuanced concept, in my view.

But the primary reason I have been rewatching this episode for more than 22 years now is its unassuming density. SpongeBob is wonderfully breezy, but its hidden strength is how layered each joke is: I laugh at different things every time—a certain line delivery, a certain facial expression—and impulsively repeat its most memorable quotes. “Chocolate,” says the pruned old-lady fish, wistfully. “Sweet, sweet chocolate. I always hated it!”

— Allegra Frank, senior editor

Here are three Sunday reads from The Atlantic:

The anti-social century The army of God comes out of the shadows. The agony of texting with men

The Week Ahead

September 5, a drama film detailing an ABC Sports crew’s efforts to cover the massacre at the 1972 Olympics in Munich (in theaters nationwide Friday) Season 2 of Severance, a sci-fi series about a corporate employee who agrees to surgically “sever” his personal life from his work life (streaming on Apple TV+ on Friday) The JFK Conspiracy, a book by Josh Mensch and Brad Meltzer about the first assassination attempt on John F. Kennedy (out Tuesday)

Essay

Illustration by Jackson Gibbs

Parents Are Gaming Their Kids’ Credit Scores

By Michael Waters

Several years ago, Hannah Case decided to examine her personal credit history. Case, who was then a researcher at the Federal Reserve, hadn’t gotten her first credit card until she was 22. But as she discovered when she saw her file, she’d apparently been spending responsibly since 14.

Read the full article.

More in Culture

The reason The Brutalist needs to be so long The payoff of TV’s most awaited crossover What to read when the odds are against you September 5 captures a crisis becoming must-watch TV. The bizarre brain of Werner Herzog The film that rips the Hollywood comeback narrative apart

Catch Up on The Atlantic

Trump’s sentencing made no one happy. Trump is right that Pax Americana is over, Charles A. Kupchan argues. Why “late regime” presidencies fail

Photo Album

A man watches as flames from the Palisades Fire close in on his property in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. (Ethan Swope / AP)

The Palisades Fire grew quickly in California, burning many structures and sending thick plumes of smoke into the air. These photos show parts of Los Angeles scorched by the wildfire.

When you buy a book using a link in this newsletter, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

On Abbott Elementary, celebrity sightings are as common as a back-to-school flu outbreak or drama with the PTA. The show’s Season 2 premiere kicked off with the spunky second-grade teacher Janine Teagues (played by Quinta Brunson) trying to surprise Abbott students with an appearance from “the only celebrity that matters”: Gritty, the internet-famous mascot for the Philadelphia Flyers. In Season 3, Bradley Cooper joined a class for show-and-tell, the Philadelphia Eagles star Jalen Hurts tried to help a teacher’s boyfriend propose, and Questlove DJed a party in the school gym.

As on many a network sitcom, Abbott’s celebrity cameos tend to involve the stars playing themselves, with some embellished biographical details to sweeten their stories. (Questlove, for example, claimed that he and Allen Iverson both credit their illustrious careers to Abbott’s principal, who happens to be one of their closest friends.) Now, midway through its fourth season, Abbott has found a clever way to continue celebrating that hometown pride—and expand the show’s comedic arsenal. The latest episode taps some of Philly’s most well-known fictional personalities, using their outlandish antics to draw out a bit more edge from Abbott’s plucky educators.

In tonight’s episode, the main characters of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia saunter into the public school and invigorate the mockumentary by stirring up chaos. Anyone familiar with the long-running FX sitcom about a group of bartenders knows that the Sunny protagonists don’t belong anywhere near an elementary-school campus. Throughout its 16 seasons, the most of any live-action American comedy series, It’s Always Sunny has been a riotous, foul-mouthed chronicle of escalating misbehavior from a gang of total miscreants. The loosely plotted sitcom has followed the Paddy’s Pub slackers through outrageous, ill-conceived schemes that almost always reveal just how craven they are: They’ve smoked crack in an attempt to exploit the welfare system, siphoned gas to sell door-to-door, and outlined some deeply concerning strategies for picking up women.

Suffice it to say, none of them is getting invited to speak at a commencement ceremony or Career Day. By contrast, most of the strangers who’ve popped up at Abbott over the years, whether they’re district bureaucrats or local businesspeople, at least pretend to have altruistic motives. When these visitors cause issues for the school, it’s usually due to incompetence, negligence, or an easily resolved misunderstanding. And of course, there’s generally a moral at the end of the story—the kind of humorous, heartfelt fare that makes Abbott so beloved as family viewing.

[Read: Abbott Elementary lets Black kids be kids]

But things go awry almost immediately after the Sunny squad shows up in “Volunteers,” the first of two planned crossover episodes. The gang arrives at Abbott under the guise of offering the overworked educators some much needed help from the local school district. Instead, Mac (Rob McElhenney), Charlie (Charlie Day), Dennis (Glenn Howerton), Frank (Danny DeVito), and Deandra (Kaitlin Olson) quickly discover that there are documentary cameras rolling at Abbott, prompting the superlatively toxic Dennis to excuse himself because he knows “quite a bit about filming and consent.” The others stick around, acting slightly more buttoned-up than usual because they know they’re being recorded, but they’re still too abrasive to fit in. They admit that they’re there only to satisfy the community-service requirements of a court order, and in response to one teacher calling them criminals, ask whether it’s really a “crime” to dump 100 gallons of baby oil, 500 Paddy’s Pub T-shirts, and a Cybertruck in the Schuylkill River.

These kinds of ludicrous scenarios are par for the course on Sunny, but they strain the boundaries of the malfeasance we usually see from Abbott characters. For the educators, that creates an amusing challenge: The Sunny gang isn’t a pack of wayward teenagers waiting for an understanding mentor to show them the light, and their moral failures can’t be rehabilitated with a pep talk. No earnest, well-articulated argument for the importance of early-childhood education will make characters like these abandon their selfishness, and the unexpected dose of cynicism gives Abbott’s formula an intriguing mid-season shake-up—a nice wrinkle, considering how many network sitcoms begin to feel repetitive the longer they stay on the air.

Take the drama caused by Deandra, or “Sweet Dee.” This episode finds the lone woman in the main Sunny crew initially bonding with Janine while volunteering in her classroom: Dee praises Janine in front of the second graders after the two women realize they both attended the University of Pennsylvania. But their camaraderie takes a hit when Dee starts lusting after Gregory (Tyler James Williams), Janine’s fellow teacher—and, after a lengthy will-they-won’t-they storyline, also her boyfriend. When Janine tells Dee that she’s in a relationship with Gregory, the Sunny transplant is undeterred: “You’re good if I take a spin though, yeah?” It’s the first time Janine’s encountered a real romantic foil on the series, and as the conflict plays out, Dee’s brash flirting style forces Janine to acknowledge her fears about the relationship. These scenes offer Janine, easily the most childlike of the teachers, an opportunity to grow by facing the tension head-on—a feat made easier by her having a farcical villain in Dee.

Abbott will never be the kind of show where the main cast routinely has to fend off mean-spirited romantic sabotage or keep tabs on a man who gives off serious Andrew Tate vibes. After the volunteers slink back to Paddy’s, the most shiftless person on campus will once again be Principal Coleman (Janelle James), whose ineptitude and vanity don’t prevent her from advocating for the students from time to time. Still, the Sunny crossover episode marks a compelling chapter in Abbott’s evolution. The series has stayed family-friendly thanks to its educational setting, showcasing the comic talents of both its students and teachers. But Abbott is now proving itself adept at something different too: comedy with a real bite, even if it’s not in service of teaching a lesson.

The French satirical magazine wants to show its cause is still kicking, writes the BBC's Hugh Schofield.