For a while back there, the Chippendales were inescapable. Buffed and sheened to a high polish, strutting around in nothing but bowties and cuffs like the oblivious victims of the world’s smartest tuxedo thieves, the male stripping troupe seemed unstoppable. Formed in 1979, in just a few short years they went from weekday filler act in a failing bar to globe-straddling success story. But then it all went wrong. While they are still technically a going concern – the website for their sole remaining Las Vegas act promises a “mantastic, sex-god, abs party”, while their online store offers everything from Santa hats to dildos – public interest has long since waned. What began as a genuinely electrifying form of entertainment, offering women the same thrills that men had taken for granted for centuries, has now become kitschy and quaint; a remnant of a world that has long since ceased to be. However, that doesn’t mean the Chippendales aren’t big business. At the start of the year, Gimlet Media released a podcast series entitled Welcome to Your Fantasy, which put their success into a genuinely berserk context. If you listened, you’ll know that the group eventually descended into chaos as its founder got caught up in an orgy of racketeering, arson and murder. Such was the success of Welcome to your Fantasy that it was quickly optioned for TV, with Kumail Nanjiani set to play its founder, Somen “Steve” Banerjee. While that series, titled Immigrant, is still in development, we now have Curse of the Chippendales, a Discovery+ series available to watch in the UK on Amazon Prime. Suddenly anybody with a passing interest in the rise and fall of one specific male stripper troupe finds themselves spoilt for choice. And little wonder, because the story of the Chippendales is jaw-dropping. Across four episodes, Curse of the Chippendales unfolds like a pacy airport paperback. There is sex. There are drugs. There are mullets. There are men in tiny pants thrusting their genitals into bowler hats. There is success that comes so quickly that nobody involved quite knows how to cope with it. And then, at the end, there is tragedy piled on tragedy. It’s like watching The Godfather, if the cast of The Godfather had just painted themselves orange and developed a crippling addiction to Veet. The series captures the sheer giddy hysteria of early Chippendale shows, where buffed-up men with WWE haircuts would bask in the adulation of women who, just a few years before, were in thrall to Beatlemania. At the outset, the enterprise is presented to viewers as fun and frothy. Then we cut to the interviewees, who sit starkly before harsh lights, their voices ruined by decades of chain-smoking. These people, you quickly figure out, have seen things. They chased the euphoria of the early days a little too hard, and their bodies have been struggling to catch up ever since. It’s a bittersweet hint of what is to come. Because, halfway through the season’s four episodes, you can see the success of the Chippendales start to gallop out of control. The bigger they get, the more opposition they encounter. Religious groups start to stage protests. Clubs are firebombed. Lawsuits pile up, accusations of racism are flung around. And, internally, the two men in charge lock themselves into a battle for total control of the group. Before long, one of them is dead. At this point, Curse of the Chippendales becomes a full-on true crime documentary. I’ll refrain from too many spoilers, even though they are all widely available to anyone with an internet connection, but the final episode takes the form of a crushing, relentless police procedural as the authorities figure out what has been going on behind the scenes. You can see why Immigrant was rushed to series so quickly with source material like this. It will almost certainly be a combination of GLOW and American Crime Story, and it has the potential to be very good indeed. More than anything, though, Curse of the Chippendales is a neat reminder that the act wasn’t quite as kitsch as you remember. Look anywhere in 2021 – Love Island, Instagram, the Marvel Cinematic Universe – and you’ll see that society has adopted the group’s aesthetic wholesale. The haircuts might have changed, but the bodies – all tanned and muscular and hairless – have become mainstream. Three decades ago the only way to experience this sort of obsessively honed male body was to rock up to a hen party where a Magnum PI lookalike would jackhammer his crotch at you. Now even Ant-Man looks like a Chippendale. There’s a legacy if ever you saw one.