HBO Max
Eventually, every piece of pop culture minutia will receive an additional 15 minutes of fame via an in-depth documentary, and on Dec. 15 that spotlight shines on Miss Cleo, the late psychic whose TV infomercials were a ubiquitous presence between 1997 and 2003. Call Me Miss Cleo, however, proves to be a surprising non-fiction venture—for all the wrong reasons.
Directed by Celia Aniskovich and Jennifer Brea, Call Me Miss Cleo revisits the rise-and-fall saga of Miss Cleo, whose career took off thanks to small-screen spots for the Psychic Readers Network (PRN), a call-in service that let consumers speak to a fortune teller for free for the first three minutes, and at a predatory $4.99/minute rate afterwards. “Call me now!” she exclaimed at the end of each ad in her trademark Jamaican accent. For a time, countless Americans did, in the process turning Miss Cleo into the face—and star—of a flash-in-the-pan psychic hotline trend that swept the nation. Talk show appearances, merchandise, and parodies followed, many of which are amusingly revisited by this documentary, which doesn’t skimp on the old-school Miss Cleo archival material.
In that regard, Call Me Miss Cleo is as standard as such affairs come, replete with a variety of talking heads fondly reminiscing about their first exposure to the well-known psychic, whose shtick centered around her amazing tarot card-reading abilities. Raven-Symoné and Mad TV veteran Debra Wilson remember spoofing Miss Cleo during her heyday, while a collection of friends and colleagues praise her warm spirit, her big heart, and her magnetic charisma, all of which allowed her to achieve a small measure of celebrity. What’s addressed in far vaguer terms, however, is Miss Cleo’s backstory, which no one seems to know anything about—including her real name, which can’t be definitively ascertained (she used many aliases throughout her life), and even her accent, which reportedly wasn’t real.