68 new york | january 3–16, 2022
PHOTOGRAPH: WONDERYi know whatyou’re going to
say aboutStation Eleven,and
I get it. After nearly two years of living
through a pandemic in real life, the last
thing you want to do is watch a show
about a pandemic.
But here’s the thing:Station Eleven,
an adaptation of Emily St. John Mandel’s
unexpectedly prescient 2014 novel, is a
limited series you should see not despite
the stress we’ve endured but because of it.
Created by Patrick Somerville, whose past
credits includeMade for Love, Maniac,
and, most tellingly,The Leftovers, Station
Elevenfocuses on a flu that spreads rap-
idly, causing panic, quarantines, and an
immense loss of life.
The sickness in this HBO Max series
instantly starts taking out humans
and basic infrastructure; it seems non-
hyperbolic when it is referred to as “the
end of the world.” (Audio from a televi-
sion broadcast notes that the survival
rate with this flu is one in 1,000. Chicago,
where the series is initially set, “is not
Chicago anymore. It’s just 2.5 million
bodies.”) YetStation Elevenis, at its core,TV/ JEN CHANEYRemains of the DayStation Elevenisa pandemic showyou’ll actually wantto keep watching.now the subject of Operator, an eight-
part podcast series from Wondery.
Operator’s premise is attention-
grabbing, for obvious reasons, and
the concept feels like a pitch-perfect
match between form and subject. An
audio series about a phone-sex empire
just makes sense, and the show is well
positioned to get into the weeds of tele-
erotica: its appeal, its art, its nuances.
It’s not unprecedented for podcasts,
either. Shows likeThe Heart and the
collected works of that series’ co-creator
Kaitlin Prest have long explored the
territory of sex, sexuality, and intimacy
using the medium.
Sadly,Operatorisn’t that kind of pro-
duction. Despite the spicy subject matter,
the podcast—created by Mike Connors
and Daryl Freimark—turns out to be
more interested in telling a pretty con-
ventional business story. ATN was the
brainchild of Mike Pardes, a successful
businessman with a colorful past invol-
ving nightclubs and some jail time. He
took the concept of combining sexual
fantasy with the emerging craze for 1-900
numbers—phone lines people would
call to access all sorts of audio enter-
tainment, for which they were charged
by the minute—and rode the demand
from horny dads all across the country
into a billion-dollar venture. (This ATN
is unrelated to the Fox-like network on
Succession, but the evocation feels appro-
priate.) Pardes’s journey drives the narra-
tive in Operator, and it’s engaging on its
own terms, if predictable.
You do get some novelty in the begin-
ning, when the show recalls the birth
of the phone-sex business as a whole.
According to lore, it all started in the ’80s
when a guy, identified in the series by the
pseudonym “Richard,” concocted a plan
to deliver talk therapy over the phone and
advertised the service in the pages of this
very magazine. The experiment led to the
discovery that—surprise, surprise—men
who called the number were often look-
ing for more than someone with whom to
share their problems. “They wanted a girl
with big breasts,” says Richard matter-of-
factly. “So, hey, they want a girl. Go get
them a girl.”
Pardes founded ATN in 1990 and
quickly muscled out the competition. Its
fast rise, and eventual fall, gives Operator
its arc. We follow Pardes as he assembles
a cadre of executives, all men, including a
whiz-kid technologist named Michael Self
who would become Pardes’s surrogate son
of sorts; together, they scale up the physi-
cal infrastructure of the business, hiring
a platoon of sex workers, referred to as
“operators,” to work the phones. Years of
untold riches and debauchery pass until
a mix of government pressure and execu-
tive infighting drags the company into
the thick of crisis. There are betrayals,
legal warfare, and a corporate coup, all of
which severely weaken ATN, before the
looming threat of the internet finishes the
whole thing off. A parable and a legend,
Operator is a quintessential capitalist
story about the life cycle of an empire,
one that existed just outside polite society.
Pardes’s recollections, along with those of
the other executives—most of whom were
interviewed for the series—are rich with
the sleazeball-raconteur texture you’d
want from a milieu like this.
Operator generally tries to balance
out the bro-fest by layering in the voices
and experiences of the women who
worked the phone-operating floor at
ATN. The series circles around a tension
that rises out of the arrangement: The
operators worked long, grueling hours
at a renovated warehouse, far from the
plush offices of the executives, but we’re
told they were also allowed relative
autonomy and comfort in their work.
There was safety, as well, away from
the physical risks that can accompany
sex work. Operator dances along the
line of arguing that the operators were,
to a point, empowered—even as they
were excluded from the massive profits
reaped by ATN leadership and eventu-
ally treated as disposable.
Operator’s efforts to carve out a
rounded, humanistic picture of ATN’s
labor force are often undermined
by the show’s clearer interest in the
corporate-intrigue narrative. The pod-
cast also makes ineffective use of Tina
Horn, who serves as a narrator and
co-writer. Horn is normally found in
the audio world as the host of Why Are
People Into That?!, an independent pod-
cast exploring kinks and other forms of
sexual intimacy that draws heavily on
her own history as a sex educator. Asidefrom a brief anecdote in the first episode,
Horn’s perspective doesn’t come across
in Operator very much; mostly, she just
shepherds the story.
Should you be in the mood for the thrills
of a business drama, you’ll find much to
enjoy here. Grok the similarities between
the power dynamics of ATN as portrayed
in Operator and the digitalized sex-work
environment of today: Whether it’s phone
sex or OnlyFans, there’s always a medi-
ating platform consolidating power and
value, typically leaving the workers more
or less in the same state of uncertainty.
But if you’re looking for something more
than just Barbarians at the Gate—some-
thing that truly grapples with the sticky
intersection of capitalism and private
desire—adjust your expectations. For a
show about subversive desires, Operator
can be remarkably vanilla. ■