HBOs The Wish Was Too Long

In an age of maximum polarization, when our country has never been so divided, surely we can all agree on at least one thing: HBO The wish was way too long. Somewhere during our nine-hour journey with NXIVM, the most strangely mundane sex cult ever led by a volleyball enthusiast, our gaze changed from horrified to frustrated. The wish are 198 episodes too long, read a recent social media crack. With the series now renewed for a second season, directors Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim get to extend the trip for another round, even if they face dissent online.

The wish on HBO, 5 episodes are too long, read another tweet. I’m bored but I’m engaged.

And another: Someone else wants The wish is about a month too long? I swear I’ve been watching it since the start of summer.

We continued to watch, of course. We must have seen how it ended, and given the horror of the crimes committed, the layered ploys, the alluring manipulations the value of which cannot be disputed. But the irritation here is simple. How could a documentary series on such a tantalizing subjectKeith Raniere, a bespectacled life coach, wearing sweatpants with an ass cut that turned out to be a sex cult Svengali, brainwashing women to be branded as cattlemanage to become boring?

Let’s Count the Means: Through endless repetition of the mundane details of life, phone calls, meetings, walks around the neighborhood, and café chats of a handful of escapees seeking to bring NXIVM down. It didn’t help that there was so much confusing similar footage throughout the series. The wish was compelling but comprehensive, detailed but drawn, resonant but repetitive. Above all, this story of largely white, upper-middle-class men and women eager to improve themselves with Executive Success Programs, or ESPs, and handing over their money, trust, and guarantees, jumped out at us. time. as a whiplash, proving that even evil can lose its shock if you show it quietly pontificating in enough intimate discussions on the couch.

To be clear, some of the techniques listed above have also worked for The wish. The serial use of the slow-burning immersion in the pedestrian did one thing extremely well – it left its subjects screaming, Look, they were normal people, just like you! We just wanted to work on our limiting beliefs! This forced the viewer to think about how ESP and NXIVM could seem not only harmless, but even a boon to some members. They were ordinary people looking for a little help, who very often knew little about the secret inner workings of society until it was too late.

The more time we spent with them at home, talking, thinking, regretting, and investigating, the more we came to understand that the frog in boiling water analogy was extremely apt. No one goes head-first into a sex cult with a cauterizing fetish, but it turns out that a lot of people will inadvertently find themselves in a community masquerading as a self-improvement community if you just load the front-end with business- retirement atmosphere.

But still, nine o’clock? Viewers fascinated by the subject and deeply compassionate to its victims, but eyed troubled by the immersion, begin to wonder how much more they can handle this searing mess.

Seduced, a four-part Starz documentary series also about NXIVM (ahem, theres a podcast too), told the same basic story by the former member India Oxenberg. That was all The wish wasnt: The October 18 premiere gave us a straightforward and largely linear narrative with tighter, more efficient delivery, as well as a more accurate story on Ranieres history predatory behavior. More importantly, it allowed cult experts to reveal just how dangerous Raniere really was. Memorably, Oxenberg’s grandmother and these pundits stepped in to call some clear, hard bullshit all over the organization. After 30 minutes of Seduced, I’ve learned more already and haven’t had to watch someone cook or cook dinner, another recent tweet Lily.

Considering the trend of long runners such as Make a murderer, Tiger King, and Mugwort, among others over the past five years, and the hot market here and abroad for documentaries, there seems to be little chance of putting this long-term genius back in its bottle.

So how did we come to this, a nine-part documentary series on a topic that could easily have been explored in half or a third of the time? Documentaries were once dark business that viewers treated like eating their cultural veggies. Errol Morris and Ken burns raised them in a cinematic narrative, only to see them undergo a provocative, albeit rambling, makeover by people like Super size me and Bowling for Columbine, who found a way to incorporate the difference.