Netflix Made A Docuseries About 'The Real Bling Ring' Kids

“I didn’t come here to, like, save face. I came here to be honest,” says Alexis Haines (née Neiers) in the first trailer for Netflix’s The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist. Sitting in a chair with her arms crossed over her lap, the star of cult classic reality series Pretty Wild looks demure and serious as she talks to the camera. This is clearly not the same wild party-girl we saw whining to Nancy Jo Sales about her “little brown Bebe kitten heels” over a decade ago. No, this Alexis means business, and now, she’s ready to tell the truth about what happened all those years ago.

A three-episode docuseries directed by Life and Death Row’s Miles Blayden-Ryall, The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist is the latest project to tackle the salacious saga of the titular burglaries: first, there was the short-lived 2010 E! series Pretty Wild, which followed Alexis as she battled the legal system after getting arrested on charges of larceny. Then, there was The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola’s A24 hit that dramatized the burglaries in fantastically hilarious fashion. (“Let’s go to Paris’. I wanna rob,” says Emma Watson in one of the film’s more memorable lines.)

But Hollywood Heist is neither an exploitative reality series nor a star-studded reenactment. Instead, the series is more of an investigative reexamination, promising to “tell the real story behind the Hollywood Hills home-invasions that gripped the nation,” according to a plot synopsis. “A cautionary tale for teens today, the docuseries shows what can happen when a fame-and-celebrity-obsessed culture meets the rise of social media and spins wildly out of control.”

To mark the occasion, Netflix has not only recruited original Bling Ring member Alexis Neiers to open up about her experience, but also her fiercely protective mother Andrea Arlington, and fellow member Nick Norgo (née Prugo), who says in the trailer that, had he been consulted at all, he would have cast “a super young, maybe, like, Tom Cruise” to portray him in The Bling Ring.

But isn’t that kind of one-sided, you may wonder, since making a docuseries about theft and only involving the robbers would, indeed, be so. Well, Hollywood Heist is already one step ahead of you: The Hills’ Audrina Patridge, one of the Bling Ring’s unlucky victims, is also included. “It was like they went shopping in my closet,” she says in the trailer. Later, she admits, “After my house was broken into, I was the most terrified I’ve ever been in my entire life.” (Speaking of “most terrified I’ve ever been,” there’s also an appearance by Perez Hilton as a talking head. So…yeah.)

As for how the original Bling Ring members feel about their role in everything now, it’s hard to fully tell. Alexis, for one, refutes the narrative that was painted of her, especially through The Bling Ring. “They made me The Bling Ring leader, which is totally not based in any reality,” she says. Nick, for his case, seems interested in at least contextualizing his choices. “I had always been the type of person to kind of do whatever I had to get that I wanted,” he says at one point. “But I never thought in my wildest dreams that it would reach the level of criminality that it did.”

Check out the trailer below. The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist hits Netflix on September 21.