Radial Entertainment is looking to bring fresh takes and approaches to popular content genres like true crime and just premiered new Radial Original series A Perfect Scam, in collaboration with Sphere Abacus.
The 10-episode true crime series debuts today, June 15, on Radial’s FilmRise channel across streaming devices and apps in the U.S. and Canada.
FilmRise is a streaming destination available on FAST and AVOD as well as SVODs like Amazon Prime Video and Peacock, offering factual and investigative programming, among other types of content.
We chatted with Radial Chief Investment Officer David Buoymaster about the latest original from the independent distributor – and how it serves as a prime example of the company’s broader content strategy and approach to originals. Want to hear more from Buoymaster and Radial? He’ll be speaking about co-productions and the future of scalable storytelling on June 18 at the StreamTV Show in Denver.
Former FilmRise executive Buoymaster became CIO of Radial in July 2025 after the company formed through an acquisition by Oaktree Capital that merged independent content distributors FilmRise and Shout! Studios.
With A Perfect Scam, part of the appeal is the real-world and timely relevance with new subject matter for a popular and proliferated true crime genre that continues to see demand.
“What we’ve seen is a huge amount of engagement for properties that have kind of a hook” and where the concept of a scam “actually is very relatable,” Buoymaster told StreamTV Insider.
Produced by Peninsula Television, the one-hour episodes each tell stories of victims who have fallen prey to sophisticated scams and examines the growing reliance on digital tools like online dating, banking and social media and how they can be weaponized against the unsuspecting.
On the thread of relatability and relevance, the release cited stats that nearly 70,000 people reported a romance scam in a one-year period, with reported losses reaching approximately $1.3 billion. By the time many victims realized what had happened, they had already lost thousands of dollars.
Another factor influencing investment in the series is that there’s a deep pool of stories to pull from within the broader vertical.
There’s “a huge amount of inventory of scams to cover in shows,” Buoymaster noted, meaning a chance to expand into franchises and not a one-and-done.
That ability to repeat is a key question as Radial thinks about which shows are worth investing in.
“Ultimately how returnable is a property,” Buoymaster explained of the approach, which he feels A Perfect Scam “fits really nicely into”.
And while true crime shows already proliferate, Radial does not see signals that audiences are tapping out on the genre yet.
“We’re seeing incredibly high engagement across almost all of our true crime series,” he commented.
But within the popular genre, Radial is focused on unique ways and stories to engage audiences with and is pursuing docuseries shows with not-yet-told storylines or with fresh angles and approaches.
That includes incorporating more real-world and archival footage instead of relying on reenactments.
A Perfect Scam also looks to tie in cultural relevance with timely and topical angles as more people are exposed to digital scams.
Storylines for the series span romance scam, social media-enabled fraud, dating website deception, online banking schemes, and confidence crimes in which victims are groomed, betrayed, and left to deal with emotional and financial consequences. Each episode traces the full lifecycle of a scam, from earning initial trust to the eventual betrayal.
Different takes on similar concepts
Although the company sees plenty of ways to pull new angles from this vertical, Radial isn’t betting on just one title.
It has a similar approach with other series in the true crime or financial crime genre, such as the recently released Fatal Fraud.
Per Buoymaster, the company is eager to see how the two shows in a comparable vertical perform side-by-side (scroll down for more on this later in the piece).
“They’re slightly different takes on similar concepts and we actively measure and closely monitor what is the different audience engagement.”
Radial does that compare and contrast across essentially all content acquisitions but it’s particularly key for the company’s original series.
For originals, “our goal is to ultimately develop series and franchises that we can make multiple seasons of.”
Again, that repeatable nature is a crux of the investment strategy as Radial looks to build more depth in originals.
This is the first season of A Perfect Scam, but the goal, if it performs, is to return the series and “potentially order two or three more seasons in short order to create a volume of library that is substantial and ultimately creates uplift across all of the episodes,” he said.
Fresh angles, approaches for popular genres, docuseries
As Radial’s FilmRise is distributed on AVOD, FAST and streaming services like Amazon Prime Video and Peacock, it’s reaching younger audiences as well as folks in older demos that might be new to streaming.
It’s not investing and making content for a specific demo but instead is trying to deliver “a modern take on the docuseries.”
Content wise, including for A Perfect Scam that means formats that rely less on reenactments (which in the past may have a reputation for being cheesy), and instead doing more source and first-party interviews, archival footage, conversations with witness and relatives of victims, or, in the case of a true crime story, people that worked on the actual case such as prosecutors or law enforcement.
This coincides with a focus on a bit of a tighter format that packs more in at a quicker pace. He noted a story that could have been two episodes or a 90-minute documentary is now one 42-minute episode.
That has to do with consumer behavior as Buoymaster said for the overall media landscape “attention spans across all demographics are shrinking.”
And Radial wants to “make sure that we’re keeping the format current with what audiences want to watch” including duration.
All of the episodes of the new series are hour-long broadcasts, so essentially 40 minutes-plus when allotting time for advertising. But the investment chief said short-form is in the company’s future as well.
Radial is still primarily focused on long-form content, but “we’re going to short-form,” Buoymaster said. “We will and are actively considering some short form stuff.”
Using data to inform investment, refine formats and angles
Buoymaster described Radial’s content investment approach as both a mix of art and science. And as one might imagine, data does come into play in multiple parts of the process to help inform content decisions and investment at the company.
Sticking with the financial crimes genre example, in initial stages that includes leveraging data to help the company decide what exactly they want to pull from that aforementioned deep well of scams.
Per the investment chief, data is used to figure out what the highest engagement stories are to select and “what ultimately resonates with as broad a swath of audience or potential audience as possible.”
Not purely data-driven
However, content investment decisions aren’t purely data-driven.
“We wouldn’t have leaned in as much to original series as we have over the last year if we were purely looking at data,” said Buoymaster, noting there’s a lot of information out there to say that true crime is tremendously saturated, for example.
Instead, Radial had a hypothesis and then uses data to validate and course correct or slightly tweak the direction of the strategy and optimize.
In that sense, data’s leveraged to help the company learn what’s hitting the mark and what’s not among series elements like format, subject matter and so on, and adjust accordingly.
What Radial really likes about launching new properties like these, according to Buoymaster, is that it gives the company a lot of information about the initial audience reactions to different verticals as well as insight into what’s connecting among different properties in the same vertical.
“Ultimately we can refine that strategy if and when we go deeper into the specific series or a comparable series,” he explained. “We can learn from what ultimately resonated and what are the kind of common threads or common traits of the specific episodes that were highest engagement that we can learn from and get better at in the next.”
Compare and contrast story elements that hit the mark
By way of example, Fatal Fraud and A Perfect Scam are similar, but where the former is more purely financial-focused and the latter a bit broader in terms of a focus on overall scams with digital tools.
As Radial compares and contrasts, Buoymaster said they’re getting “a decent data set” around elements that are attracting audiences and engagement, such as format, subject matter, the specific type of scam (cybercrime versus others, for example), and even the type of victims of scams that viewers are most interested in.
“There are slightly different takes across the two properties on that exact topic. So we’re trying to just see what is the right way to tell the story in a modern ecosystem,” he said.
Buoymaster affirmed this approach can also be applied to other content genres or verticals.
Radial is increasingly leaning into historical and some automotive content, with an eye on a wave factual and auto series in the second half of the year, he noted.
And again, while there have been countless World War II documentaries, the company is seeking ways to tell specific angles around existing verticals like history and reintroduce topics to new audiences.
In Buoymaster view, some of the best information Radial has its existing deep catalog of content – which spans over 70,000 movies and episodes. That offers a place to find and serve comparable audiences and “almost draft off the success of prior iterations [of content] that we’re actively distributing”.
Not forcing volume, ok to be proven wrong
However, as Radial releases content, gets back information and tweaks series to be as compelling as possible, Buoymaster also doesn’t mind when data says its hypothesis was wrong.
“We’re not married to forcing a certain amount of volume out of any of these properties,” he said, noting it could order another few seasons but then decide to exit before a fourth depending on what the data shows.
“We’re happy to be proven wrong,” Buoymaster said. “To me it’s as important as being proven right, if not more important.”
That’s because Radial wants to know when to walk away from titles if they’re not resonating with audiences and whether it’s time to move on to the next one.
And of course, it surveys what else is in the market when weighing content investments, as the company doesn’t want to step into highly saturated areas.
Audiences not yet tapped out on true crime
Still, as mentioned, one might think true crime could fall into that saturated content bucket But Radial, which also distributes two classic true crime series Forensic Files and Unsolved Mysteries, continues to see high engagement with the genre.
Buoymaster said the company would take feedback if and when audiences indicate they’re tapping out on true crime, but that doesn’t appear to be the case for now.
“I don’t think we’re close to that yet,” he said of true crime fatigue. “And we certainly aren’t seeing it in the performance of the true crime content.”
From Radia’s purview, while there’s no shortage of true crime content, there is plenty still untapped. That’s where it’s investing in series that provide something net-new within the genre – both in terms of angle and audience it’s distributing to.
A Perfect Scam and Fatal Fraud are two series Radial felt are serve an underserved vertical within true crime, the investment chief said.
Results so far with this fresh angle approach have been promising.
“There is appetite and we see the engagement flow through in the first month of distribution across a lot of these original formats that, from our perspective, really validate the demand for just a new take and new material across a bunch of these formats.”
Series on similar topics to A Perfect Scam have been around like American Greed on CNBC, which Buoymaster acknowledged was somewhat of the original template for a financial crimes series but is no longer running.
With A Perfect Scam and Fatal Fraud Radial wants to not only bring fresh takes, but also audiences with distribution on free streaming including via AVOD and FAST, as well as “some of the SVOD platforms in short order”.
It’s also seeing appetite from CTV platform and service partners that are seeking to build up their own content offerings.
“A Perfect Scam is a timely addition to Radial’s growing true crime slate and a meaningful expansion of our Radial Originals lineup,” said Cristina Guggino, Vice President of Co-Productions & Content Partnerships at Radial Entertainment, in statement. “Scam crime is one of the fastest-evolving threats of the digital age, and the human cost is devastating. This series gives victims a voice while offering audiences an unflinching look at how these crimes are conceived, executed, and – too often—repeated.”
Co-productions vs full commissions
In March Radial acquired New Dominion Pictures, which had almost 1,000 hours worth of content and three key evergreen unscripted series FBI Files, New Detectives and A Haunting.
Radial is revitalizing the FBI Files with 20 episodes, tapping Bright North Studios to do it under a full-commission model.
“We’re really excited” said Buoymaster of the full commission model, in addition to co-productions the company does, as it “will give us more complete control over the global rights these series.”
It plans to take the known franchise model to geographies outside of the U.S., which it’s better suited to.
“It is something we’re really excited about with owning a little bit more of the IP that we control or distribute,” he said. “And ultimately putting some of those owned series back into production and having full control over our destiny there.”
Still, he said Radial loves the co-production model, which is what it’s pursued for A Perfect Scam, and has benefits like faster turnaround and good prices.
Co-production provides “a way to access a good amount of volume at an attractive price point” alongside a valuable feedback loop that helps inform whether the company wants to do more full commissions in the vertical, Buoymaster explained – which is particularly important for original series.
That’s the approach it’s taking with properties in the historical genre, with plans for “a bunch of co-production releases” that are original series in the second half of the year.
Radial expects to release around 300 hours of original series in total this year.
“Based on how those perform, I think we’re quite excited about then potentially doing some full commissions, but it’s a really good entry point for us to begin to understand it,” Buoymaster said.