Ashley Madison hack perfect timing for TV producers

Ashley Madison's website was hacked last week. Photo / AP

In the week following the Ashley Madison hack, which wreaked so much havoc for so many people, you can bet multiple Hollywood executives had the same thought: This would be an amazing idea for a TV show.

Don't worry, someone's on it. Last year, production company OutEast Entertainment partnered with Canadian studio MarbleMedia to develop a scripted drama that "will explore the taboo world of extramarital affairs in the digital age and how they evolve". Now, thanks to the events of the last week, that project has received an extra shot of attention as the producers are shopping it around to various networks.

"There are a lot of TV shows doing a great job of presenting marriage storylines in new ways, but what we're positing here is, what if there is a third lane to run in and what if you were honest about it?" producer Courtney Hazlett told the Hollywood Reporter.

THR confirmed that the working title is Thank You Ashley Madison. Instead of ripping straight from backstory of the real-life site, THR reports, the main character will now be a mum who starts the site when she needs money for her family; in real life, the CEO of Ashley Madison is Noel Biderman. Of course, the show will cover last week's incident when millions of email addresses were hacked and revealed.

Honestly, even though it's the kind of juicy drama that would do well on a TV show, this concept has another thing going for it: People love TV shows about real-life scandals. Just look at the success of The Good Wife, which started as it mirrored the Eliot Spitzer incident: Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies) standing side by side with her disgraced politician husband, Peter Florrick (Chris Noth).

Or The Client List, based on the massage parlour/prostitution ring in Texas, which garnered such high ratings as a TV movie that it became a TV series starring Jennifer Love Hewitt. Plus, we can't forget Scandal, based on the life of Judy Smith, an actual fixer of Washington scandals.

Anyway, the potential Ashley Madison series could have a big launch at first, especially considering that the fallout from the hack is likely to affect some people for a long, long time. But could weekly instalments of affairs keep viewers' attention? Producers are hopeful there's an endless amount of material to explore.

In a Hollywood Reporter story last year, Biderman (who supported the development of a TV series) explained the rationale for why people would be interested.

"We'd all liked to have been a fly on the wall as Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton fooled around in the Oval Office," he said. "And we'd all loved to have been there when Tiger Woods bedded mistress after mistress."

Site's gender split laid bare

Ashley Madison has long claimed, in triumphant news releases and slick, web-ready graphics, that it is one of the few dating sites that really clicks with women.

According to statistics CEO Noah Biderman has trumpeted in the media, Ashley Madison enjoys an overall 70/30 gender split - with a 1:1 male/female ratio among the under-30 set.

But the user records laid bare by hackers last week tell a very different story: Of the more than 35 million records released, only 5 million - a mere 15 per cent - actually belonged to women.

This discrepancy may be the smoking gun that proves something angry users, industry insiders and government watchdogs have alleged for some time: that when it comes to reporting user numbers, paid dating sites distort, manipulate ... and sometimes straight-up lie.

"Ashley Madison has paid people to write profiles, and they've allowed fake profiles to proliferate on their site," said David Evans, an industry consultant who has contracted with Ashley Madison in the past and has tracked the business of online dating since 2002.

"Tonnes of sites are guilty of that. That's not news."

Ryan Pitcher, who spent two years running a fake-profile team for Global Personals, says real women accounted for less than 2per cent of total profiles on that website. He and a 28-person team spent their work hours crafting very sexy, very fictional profiles and messaging users from them.

Profile-writers made roughly US$25,000 ($38,585) a year, with bonuses for hitting subscription targets.