NSYNC singer Joey Fatone in 'Boy Band Confidential.' Courtesy of Investigation Discovery There are few people more qualified to take a hard, unflinching look at the complicated world of ‘90s boy bands than Joey Fatone.
The NSYNC singer had a front-row seat to a defining cultural moment of the ‘90s and 2000s, and now, he wants others to know what really happened, executive-producing Boy Band Confidential, a two-part Investigation Discovery doc that just finished airing Tuesday night.
“Why not now?” Fatone tells The Hollywood Reporter with a chuckle at the top of our Zoom conversation when asked about the timing. “The ‘90s are back in a sense of nostalgia. People are digging deep into that, we’re reliving things again. I think fans have heard some stories — we know the Lou Pearlman story. But there’ve been so many times I’ve talked to the guys from the other groups, and we’ve always had these candid conversations. I always thought it’d be good to tell their stories. Not just what the record company or management or whatever company did to them — what did they do in their lives?”
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Boy Band Confidential is wide-ranging, featuring the likes of Backstreet Boys’ AJ McLean, NSYNC’s Lance Bass, Boyz II Men’s Wanya Morris and Shawn Stockman, 98 degrees’ Nick Lachey and O-Town’s Ashley Parker Angel, among others. Through those subjects, the series touches on the archetypes that are all but commonplace with the dark side of the music industry, including tackling addiction, racism, sexual abuse, and gun violence.
“There’s definitely a common ground with all of us in the sense of the feelings and stress, and the highs and the lows of performing,” Fatone says. “But I thought it was important that we show that everybody had a different path and different story. With some of these guys, we’re going all the way back to pretty much when they were born.”
Fatone and longtime managerJoe Mulvihill, who also produced the documentary, says the boy band members were reluctant at first about sharing their stories on camera, but that they trusted Fatone as one of their peers, a crucial step in getting the project off the ground.
“It was very therapeutic for them,” Fatone says. And you saw them open up even more because the fact that I’m talking to them, we’re on the same ground.”
As Mulvihill adds: “We told them what we were doing, and they knew Joey would be there. They knew I wouldn’t allow something to go out that would make them look however they don’t want to look like. We felt like it was important to get gain the trust, which we had over the years.”
The Take 5 boy band, here with Lou Perlman (center): brothers Ryan and Jeff “Clay” Goodell, Tilky Jones, Stevie Sculthorpe, and Tim “TJ” Christofore. Courtesy of Investigation Discovery Speaking with THR, ID President Jason Sarlanis praised Fatone’s production work, adding that the series only came from “his ability to amass this who’s who of talent coming forward and creating this almost mega boy band to tell these stories.”
Stockman and Morris looked back on the fatal shooting of their tour manager, Khalil Roundtree, who was killed in 1992 while the band was opening for MC Hammer on the Too Legit To Quit Tour. AJ McLean opened up about his struggle with staying sober; Brad Fischetti of the group LFO opened up about how all three of his former bandmates died from 2010 to 2023. In the second episode, Fatone himself opens up about nearly going bankrupt post NSYNC.
“I’m literally trying to figure out what I have to do with my family, I’m moving my family into my parents’ house, I had to figure out how to support my ex wife and my kids,” Fatone says. “Not everybody wants to talk about that.”
Unsurprisingly, some of the most notable stories in the series surround Pearlman, who launched and managed the Backstreet Boys and NSYNC and was eventually imprisoned after stealing hundreds of millions of dollars in a ponzi scheme. Pearlman faced claims of molestation for years, though he consistently denied those allegations.
This isn’t the first time a documentary has zoomed in on Pearlman’s transgressions, with 2024’s Dirty Pop: The Boy Band Scam and Lance Bass’s 2019 “The Boy Band Con: The Lou Pearlman Story digging in on some claims as well.
O-Town’s Parker detailed allegations of grooming in the new documentary, recalling others warning him not to go into a hotel room alone with Pearlman. “There were a lot of inappropriate sexual circumstances that we found ourselves in with Lou,” Parker says in the film. “Kind of chipping away at you to lower your guard.”
Parker recalled one story of Pearlman taking him and O-Town to a brothel in Germany. In another anecdote, Parker spoke about Pearlman offering to massage him in a hotel room. He also recalled the late LFO member Rich Cronin confiding in him a story of Pearlman propositioning Cronin for oral sex. Cronin shared similar stories with Howard Stern in 2009.
Fatone and Mulvihill stop short of calling their series a Lou Pearlman documentary, though they acknowledge his shadow loomed large over much of the production, impossible to avoid when talking about this era of music.
“As filmmakers, Joey and I did look at it and consider how much Lou is really in this,” Mulvihill says. “And Ashley Parker’s story is so Lou-driven because it was Making The Band. When you do a boy band documentary in the late 90s, early 2000s, Lou’s name is always brought up. It’s wild. That was never the objective. The objective was to tell people stories. It just so happens that was Ashley’s.”
When asked about what he learned hearing these stories, Fatone quips that from Pearlman “I learned what not to do. I learned what the word recoupable meant. I learned a lot of things from Lou Perlman.”
Fatone said he hadn’t previously been aware of Parker’s claims, and that he’d heard Cronin had spoken with others about Pearlman but didn’t know he ever spoke to Parker.
“Speaking for myself, I always felt it was just something off with Perlman, I just didn’t know what it was,” he says. “ You think ‘ok, businessman.’ Most businessmen are off. Let’s be real. Why is he hanging around these guys? You start to ask those questions. But in most of these documentaries, they dig down to go to ‘Lou, Lou Lou.’ It was more or less of ‘no, what happened to these guys? These guys were a part of this. They were involved. These are the ones that were manipulated. And how do we go with that?’”
Even through the claims, Boy Band Confidential still paints a complicated picture around Pearlman, with several interviewees still expressing their love for him as the man responsible for giving them careers.
It is interesting to see that a lot of these guys did care for Lou,” Fatone says. “I think because in the beginning of it, he was trying to be that father figure. I don’t even think he had the intention of hurting us as a group or a guy in general. It was more or less he wanted to fix his pockets. And that’s why we say, I wish I had the question to sit him down and go, Why? Why did you do this? With all the good that he was doing, why that?”
Through the stories around Pearlman, the pressures they face from record labels and the unique stresses of fame, does Fatone see boy band members as victims?
“I think it’s individually up to that person,” Fatone says. “Some people probably were like, ‘you know, I had a great time. It was fine. Some people, certain things were a little shady.’
Fatone, Mulvihill and Sarlanis all say Boy Band Confidential doesn’t seek to paint a wholly damning portrayal of the boy band life, but rather to show resilience and hope, pointing toward the documentary’s end, which depicts many of the subjects moving on with their lives.
As Fatone says, “there’s light at the end of the tunnel.”
As for what’s next, Mulvihill says they’re looking at similar projects in other eras and genres in the industry.
“We’re looking into rock bands, we’re looking into girl groups as a secondary series to this,” he says. “And as we’re looking in it, it’s crazy to me that there is a through line in every genre with the same type of things that go on.”
Boy Band Confidential is now streaming on HBO Max.
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