Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Age Of Influence’ On Hulu, An ABC News Docuseries That Features Influencers Who Scammed, Canceled, And Trolled Their Way To Clicks

The Age Of Influence is a six-part ABC News Studios docuseries that delves into different stories about influencers who scammed, canceled, trolled and did other not-so-pure things in their quest for clicks.

THE AGE OF INFLUENCE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The New York skyline. Anna Delvey opens a window in a room she’s being filmed in. She then talks to the camera about the concept of being an influencer. She wears an ankle tracker.

The Gist: The first episode of The Age Of Influence isn’t actually about Delvey, though she’s interviewed extensively in the second half. The episode is about Danielle Miller, a social media star who first went viral under the worst of circumstances. In 2004, while she was an eighth-grader at the prestigious Horace Mann school in New York, a video of her getting sexual with a Swiffer handle, initially meant for her boyfriend at the time, was passed along the channels you might think existed in 2004: Burned DVDs, AIM chats and file sharing sites like Kazaa. From then on, she couldn’t escape being “Swiffer Girl.”

Never mind that the video is actually considered child porn; back in the era of Girls Gone Wild, Paris Hilton’s sex tape and other similar examples, it strangely seemed to be OK to pass around the picture of a teenager masturbating with a mop handle. After Miller went to college at ASU, still damaged by being Swiffer Girl for so long, she decided to move to Los Angeles and be a con artist.

From there we get stories from former friends who ended up being victims, like a roommate whose checkbook was used by Miller to a video producer whose name she used to open debit and credit card accounts.

But when she was finally arrested for fraud and sent to Rikers Island pretrial, things really amped up when she met Delvey, the infamous socialite grifter whose story was told in Inventing Anna. The two constantly hung out behind bars, and influenced by her famous fellow inmate, Miller moved to Florida after her jail stint and started creating more elaborate scams, many of which involved fraudulent PPP loans during the early days of the pandemic.

When the feds closed in on her, she was recovering from a BBL (Brazilian butt lift), having publicized that and all her other extravagances on her instant media. She was so sore from the BBL she had to be transported to jail in “starfish position”, i.e., standing, with both hands and both feet shackled.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Take the examination of influencers from the documentary Fake Famous and merge it with a true crime show like 20/20, and you get The Age Of Influence.

Our Take: The more we watch docuseries and documentaries about influencer culture, the more we wonder just who the people we’re seeing are and exactly why they got famous. If that puts us in the “Man Yells At Cloud” category, so be it. But we spend a mind-numbing 66 minutes learning about Danielle Miller in the first episode of The Age Of Influence, and the only reaction we had the entire time was a big fat “who cares?”

The people that Miller ripped off care, of course, as does the federal government; she’s currently serving 5 years on a wire fraud conviction but is subject to more charges that could send her to prison for decades. But it felt that the episode was just as much about Miller becoming an influencer and sloughing off the “Swiffer girl” moniker as it was about her scams. It’s not even like she did these scams in secret; she has said in published articles that she considers herself a con artist.

What really annoyed us about this first episode is that it feels like a lot of what Miller did was influencer-on-influencer crime, victimizing a series of overprivileged people like herself, who don’t really have a career beyond trying to get views on Instagram.

As detailed as Miller’s scams were, it felt like the episode could have been a neat-and-clean 44 minutes and given just as much information, basically skipping over the “scene” that she was a part of. Let’s be honest: This docuseries’ target audience is around our age, and it’s less concerned about the scene that created these influencers but what they did while having people’s attention.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Miller is sentenced and led out of a federal courtroom to prison, and the door slams behind her.

Sleeper Star: It’s either Delvey or Niki Takesh, who interviewed Miller on her podcast Forbidden Fruits. Takesh did ask Miller some tough questions, but seemed to let her off the hook a whole lot.

Most Pilot-y Line: Mackinzie Dae, one of Miller’s alleged victims, talks about bringing her on a video shoot for The Dolan Twins, as if they’re as famous as, say, Taylor Swift. They may have had millions of followers on YouTube and elsewhere, but we still think talking about influencers as if they’re as famous as, well, actual superstars is still a bit precious.

Our Call: STREAM IT. As deadly dull and drawn out as the first episode of The Age Of Influence was, other episodes may yield more interesting stories. It’s just a shame that the producers of the series decided to start with a story that just didn’t have a lot of momentum to it.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.