Welcome to Your Fantasy, a popular podcast has accused Hulu’s series, Welcome to Chippendales, of ripping off its content. The allegations have sparked controversy and raised questions about content creation and ownership ethics.
With the rise of streaming platforms and the popularity of podcasts, the lines between the two have become increasingly blurred. Many podcasts have been adapted into successful television shows, including Serial, Dirty John, and Homecoming. However, this has also led to plagiarism and intellectual property theft accusations.
Petrzela said that a year before “Welcome to Your Fantasy” came out, a producer showed early episodes to different writers and producers in Hollywood to try to get them interested in making a screen adaptation. Kumail Nanjiani, his wife and writing partner, Emily V. Gordon, was also asked to work on the podcast but said no.
“Kumail and I listened to the podcast and it’s such a fun story, but unfortunately I don’t think it’s the right project for us to write,” Gordon wrote in an email to a producer as shared by Dr. Petrzela. “As much as we love watching crime stories, I don’t know if that’s a strength that we have as a writing duo. It didn’t spark an immediate take in our brains.”
In July 2021, the podcast came out. In May 2021, Hulu announced that Nanjiani would star in “Welcome to Chippendales,” which was called “Immigrant.” He also worked as an executive producer on the show with Gordon. Robert Siegel (“Pam & Tommy”) and Jenni Konner (“Girls”) served as showrunners.
The book “Deadly Dance: The Chippendales Murders,” written by K. Scot Macdonald and Patrick Montesdeoca, is said to have “inspired” the show. It was published by the Macdonalds’ Kerrera Press, which did it on its own in 2014.
Siegel gave him a “Chippendales” script in 2017, “Right after ‘The Big Sick’ came out.” Said Nanjiani, “I loved the script, but I didn’t feel ready to do it. I had a bunch more conversations with him, and then one day he was like, ‘I’m just going to tell you what the whole show is…’ He talked me through episode-by-episode, all the stuff that happened; my jaw was on the floor. I couldn’t believe that all this really happened, and by the end of his pitch, I was like, I have no choice but to do this.”
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The Times report, on the other hand, says that Hulu’s “Chippendales” used exclusive content that was only shared on the podcast “Welcome to Your Fantasy.” Podcast senior producer Eleanor Kagan gave over a dozen examples of information that was only shared with “Welcome to Your Fantasy.”
The claim is that the Hulu series used their original reporting and storyline without citing it, and that two important characters in the series were only based on details from the podcast. Because of “Welcome to Chippendales,” Netflix decided not to make “Welcome to Your Fantasy” into a streaming series. Katie Roseman also tweeted about the details of this issue.
There are many similarities between "Welcome to Your Fantasy," a non-fiction podcast which relies on exhaustive research and reporting and "Welcome to Chippendales," a dramatic series. pic.twitter.com/cTRTxO9hv8
— katie rosman (@katierosman) March 10, 2023
In the Hulu show, Juliette Lewis is thought to play the real-life Chippendales show producer Candace Mayeron. Mayeron told NYT that she tried to get in touch with the writers and producers of “Welcome to Chippendales” as well as Lewis’ talent agent to offer free consulting services, but no one answered. “There is no doubt that they relied on the podcast,” Mayeron said.
In the same way, in “Welcome to Chippendales,” Nanjiani’s character calls a church to get people to protest the live male strip show because it is so obscene. This is a publicity stunt. This story was only told on “Welcome to Your Fantasy” by the first Black Chippendales dancer, Hodari Sababu, who seems to be the inspiration for Quentin Phair’s Otis Hulu character. He thinks that the story arc of “Welcome to Chippendales” was built on the podcast episode.
“I only watched part of the TV show, but I thought, ‘How do they know that?’ The only way that they could know that is if they heard that podcast interview I did,” Sababu said.
The host of the podcast, “Welcome to Your Fantasy, Petrzela” said, “I found myself really flabbergasted by this whole situation. But then again, I come from a world of footnotes and source citations.”
This isn’t the first popular true crime streaming show in the past few years to be accused of spreading false information. Ryan Murphy’s “Dahmer” limited series, which won a Golden Globe, is alleged to not have talked to real-life victims or their families as part of its research. Since then, Murphy has denied the claim, saying that the production team spent three years researching the real story and talked to 20 people who knew the Dahmer victims.
True crime shows are even more interesting than crime shows because they are based on real crimes. Here is a list of the best true crime shows to watch right now on Hulu in the year 2023.
