It took me three full episodes of the new show Paul T. Goldman, available with your Peacock subscription, to sort of understand what director Jason Woliner was aiming for in his documentary/comedy/thriller. This show is unlike anything you have ever seen before, and has been described as anything from Threat Level Midnight (the fake spy movie that Michael Scott made in The Office) to a second cousin of Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, which kept audiences guessing last year. Given the fact that Woliner recently helmed Borat Subsequent Movie Film with Sacha Baron Cohen (after trying to talk the comedian out of it), this had my bullshit meter on high alert heading into Paul T. Goldman… because Paul himself is such a character.
I’m not even sure how to begin to describe this show to you. But basically, Paul T. Goldman is a pseudonym for a real-life man named Paul Finkelman, who has an eye-popping story to tell regarding his third wife, who might have been trying to fleece him as she helped to run an international prostitution ring. Seriously, the story goes in directions that you can never anticipate. But one riddle Paul presented in an early episode went unanswered: What does the “T” stand for in Paul T. Goldman? So when I got a few minutes with Jason Woliner, I asked him, and he laughed as he told me:
It's actually not in the show. We had it in versions. It didn’t wind up making the cut. But, I mean, Paul said it stands for ‘Trouble.’ (laughs). No one's asked me that yet. You've got the exclusive.
That is the most Michael Scott answer one could possibly imagine. And that fictional character, portrayed wonderfully by Steve Carell, is the closest scripted personality to the real-life wonder that is Paul Finkelman. Because believe me, everything that you are watching in Paul T. Goldman is not scripted. It’s not a bit. This story really happened to Finkelman. And when he went through the divorce process from a woman he claimed was fleecing him, he wrote a book titled Duplicity. You can order it on Amazon right now.
As mentioned, though, for the first three episodes of this true-crime inspired documentary, I wasn’t sure how much of Paul T. Goldman was being staged by Jason Woliner… if any of it was being staged at all. And in our interview, he clarified those concerns, saying:
I'm generally, on my own stuff, trying to do something I haven't seen before, or do something interesting with the form. I'm never trying to intentionally confuse people. And I mean, to me, the show is very straightforward, actually. It tells you exactly what it is. It starts by telling you how it came to be, in a very simple way. (Paul) tweeted at me, and this is what we did. … But I understand now that, maybe because of what we're used to seeing, (or) because of other things I've worked on, people watch it and wonder what's real. Is this whole thing a put on? This morning, I read a very amazing, long Reddit thread of someone convinced that the entire thing is fabricated and made up by me. And Paul doesn't exist. Which is so flattering to think that someone thinks I could engineer this thing over a decade from scratch and create everything.
Hopefully you have been keeping up with Paul T. Goldman. It’s definitely one of the best true crime shows available to stream, because it slips in humor to balance out the bizarre twists this true-life story actually takes. The finale of the season will arrive on Peacock on Sunday, January 22. To keep track of the rest of the new shows premiering this winter, keep checking our guide, as we update it often.
