Robert Rorke

Robert Rorke

TV

Dreyfuss is perfect as amoral, slimy Ponzi schemer in ABC’s ‘Madoff’

’Tis the season of scoundrels on TV. In one week, we’re being treated to the criminal antics of real-life villains OJ Simpson, Bernie Madoff and Charles Manson — dramatized on three separate channels.

When Bernie Madoff got caught in 2008 for engineering the greatest financial scam in US history, a spectacular story was born. The facts behind the crime were monstrous and staggering. We learned how Madoff, the former NASDAQ chairman, eluded scrutiny by the Securities Exchange Commission and other agencies. We learned how he cynically bilked the richest investors, among them non-profits like Hadassah, out of their fortunes. You can’t make a movie out of these facts unless you have the right actor playing Madoff — and, in Richard Dreyfuss, producers Linda Berman and Joe Pichirallo found the perfect guy.

“Madoff” — airing Wednesday and Thursday night on ABC — opens a gateway into Madoff’s calculating mind by using Dreyfuss’s snarky voiceover as Bernie sits with clients, sizing them up: “Nothing on earth makes people want something more than telling them they can’t have it,” he says. Promising double-digit returns, creating an air of exclusivity among his clients, the millionaires and billionaires came begging. Bernie cleverly set up two floors in Manhattan’s “Lipstick” building, one to serve as a corporate showplace and the other, utterly nondescript where he managed the private accounts with his right-hand man, Frank DiPascali (an excellent Michael Rispoli).

Bernie Madoff (Dreyfuss) heads to jail.ABC/Eric Liebowitz

The movie, based on the book “The Madoff Chronicles,” is also a portrait of the con man’s home life. He lived in understated luxury with his wife, Ruth (Blythe Danner), in a Park Avenue apartment and a Montauk beachfront home. The Madoffs come off as a close-knit, clannish family haunted by the specter of mantle cell lymphoma, which claims the lives of Madoff’s nephew and then his younger son Andrew (Danny Defarrari). The tension between Madoff and his elder son, Mark (Tom Lipinski), simmer throughout until Mark, who hanged himself in 2010, ultimately turns his father in.

When the end comes for Bernie, Dreyfuss turns from cocky tycoon to abject husband. He confesses his fiduciary sins to Ruth, but conceals the one that wounds her the most — his affair with Hadassah CFO Sheryl Weinstein (Liz Larsen) — until she publishes a tell-all book while Bernie is in prison. In an unnecessary switch to drive home the “reality” of the situation, the movie offers news footage of the celebrities (Steven Spielberg, Kyra Sedgwick) who lost a bundle, but “Madoff” has already delivered the goods.

It’s a chilling look at the rise and fall of a man whose greed knew no limits and unleashed a tide of misery.