The ’90s were a transitory decade, squarely between two technological eras. The internet was just becoming widespread enough to conjure the excitement of having the world at our fingertips. We were mere moments away from totalizing ease of access to basically anything — especially, frankly, pornography. There are some among us who can’t imagine life before texting; the same is true for life before Pornhub. But in the ’90s, there was still room for something more analog: namely, the rise of phone-sex hotlines.
You could find phone-sex hotlines today if you looked hard enough, not unlike how you can still find the last Blockbuster in Bend, Oregon. But much like Blockbuster, they have mostly been rendered historical relics. For a while, though, phone sex was an empire. Back when business was booming, one of its most prominent providers was American TelNet (ATN) — now the subject of Operator, an eight-part podcast series from Wondery.
Operator’s premise is attention-grabbing, for obvious reasons, but the concept also 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 like The Heart and the collected works of its co-creator, Kaitlin Prest, have long explored the territory of sex, sexuality, and intimacy using the medium.
Sadly, Operator isn’t that kind of production. Despite the spicy subject matter, the podcast — created by Mike Connors and Daryl Freimark — turns out to be more interested in telling a pretty conventional business story. ATN was the brainchild of Mike Pardes, a successful businessman with a colorful past involving night clubs and some jail time. He took the concept of combining sexual fantasy with the emerging craze around 1-900 numbers—phone lines people would call to access all sorts of audio entertainment, 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, obviously, but the evocation feels appropriate.) Pardes’s journey drives the narrative in Operator, which, to be fair, is engaging on its own terms, if not somewhat predictable.
You do get some novelty in the beginning, when the series 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 looking for more than someone to share their problems with. “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 physical infrastructure of the business, hiring a platoon of sex workers, referred to as “operators,” to man the phones. Years of untold riches and debauchery pass until a mix of government pressure and executive infighting drags the company into the thick of crisis. There are betrayals, legal warfare, and a corporate coup, all of which severely weakens 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 of polite society.
If you’re into that sort of thing, you’re in for a pretty good time. Pardes is what the show calls “a real character,” and his 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. In this and a few other ways, Operator pairs well with Welcome to Your Fantasy, the crime-filled Chippendales podcast from Gimlet and Pineapple Street Studios that trods similar territory.
Operator generally tries to balance out the corporate-intrigue bro-fest by layering in the voices and experiences of women who worked the phone-operating floor at ATN. The series circles around an intriguing 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 that 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 eventually 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. Even as it labors to bring in the women, the podcast remains primarily centered on Pardes and the men, ultimately aligning the lion’s share of its sympathies with their debacles.
The corporate drama of it all never feels as interesting or special as the idea of ATN’s core product. Even worse, when it does grapple with phone sex and sexuality, the show rarely goes beyond superficiality, often treating the popularity of its subject with little more than distant amusement. “You wouldn’t believe the fetishes! There was one guy, he just wanted to hear me laugh,” says an operator at one point in the series. And?
The podcast 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 podcast exploring kinks and other forms of sexual intimacy that draws heavily from her history as a sex educator. Aside from a brief anecdote in the first episode, Horn’s perspective doesn’t come across in Operator very much; mostly, she just shepherds the story. It feels like a missed opportunity.
All these criticisms aren’t to deny the pleasures that do exist within Operator. Should you be in the mood for the thrills of a conventional business drama, you’ll find much to enjoy here. You could even extend its value and 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 mediating platform consolidating power and value, typically leaving the actual workers more or less in the same state of uncertainty. But if you’re looking for something more than just Barbarians at the Gate — something that truly grapples with the sticky intersection of capitalism and private desire — adjust your expectations. For a show about something so subversive, Operator can be remarkably vanilla.
