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‘Apple Cider Vinegar’ Could Be Netflix’s Next ‘Inventing Anna’ Scammer Smash

“Inventing Anna” broke viewership records for Netflix in 2022. Will “Apple Cider Vinegar” and its skewering of an influencer who faked brain cancer follow suit?

Early in Netflix’s latest tech-grifter limited series Apple Cider Vinegar, wellness influencer Belle Gibson (Kaitlyn Dever), her voice breathy and earnest, defends herself during an interrogation. She couldn’t possibly be so morally bankrupt as to be a scammer, she says: “I could do, like, 50 personality quizzes right now and I am an empath every time.”

Apple Cider Vinegar, which premiered Feb. 7 and takes its name from a popular ingredient in the online homeopathic wellness and nutrition mega-industry, is based on the controversial downfall of the real-life Gibson, an Australian wellness guru who claimed she was effectively managing her various cancer diagnoses through healthy eating and alternative medicine, gaining traction via the burgeoning social media and app start-up industry of the early 2010s. It later turned out that, not only was she not treating cancer with supplements and organic foods, she never had cancer at all, of any kind.

The show charts the trajectory of Netflix’s other grifter-thrashing limited series like Inventing Anna, closely following its subject as well as all the unfortunates left in her wake.

Netflix unleashed Inventing Anna, Shonda Rhimes’ series based on the splashy New York magazine article about huckster socialite Anna Delvey, in February 2022, during the tail end of the pandemic’s “we’re all kinda just still at home all the time” vibes.

The reviews were middling, at best, with the show’s wild tonal shifts rendering viewers dizzy. But star Julia Garner’s outlandish, unplaceable accent playing Delvey combined with the juiciness of her real-life scams made the series an addictive watch. At the time, Inventing Anna set a record for the most-watched English-language series in a single week on Netflix.

Surely, the streamer is hoping Apple Cider Vinegar will replicate that success. But can it?

In Apple Cider Vinegar, Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey) becomes obsessed with following Belle’s teachings after receiving a cancer diagnosis, while her journalist husband (Mark Coles Smith), frustrated with her refusal to undergo medical treatment and afraid for her life, looks into the veracity of Belle’s claims. Belle is partially inspired by the young wellness influencer Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey), who also started looking into health foods and alternative therapies after her own cancer diagnosis prompted her doctors to advise her to surgically remove her arm, and suspects that Belle has been copying her brand.

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It’s a real mess, and the show isn’t afraid to get messy. Both Milla and Belle attract a desperate, mainly female audience who are looking for alternative ways to fix themselves—distrustful of medical science, yes, but, more importantly, deeply, deeply afraid of death.

The show looks squarely, without judging, at the compulsions that can easily drive people away from fact and toward pseudoscience, and at those who make their money off of them.

“Belle doesn’t have friends,” a character explains later in the show, “she has hosts.” (The real story is an even stronger censure of fringe science and anti-vax sensibilities—Gibson was a proponent of drinking raw milk and undergoing young blood transfusion among a litany of other alternative cures, and the cancers she claimed she was afflicted with were a result, she said, of an adverse reaction to the Gardasil cervical cancer vaccine.)

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More than any of that, the show paints a comprehensive picture of the ways digital technology can be weaponized, can take over our minds and drive us to extremes. Belle is depicted as a lonely teen with a domineering mother (a terrifying Essie Davis of Babadook fame), who learned early in life to use vague health complaints as a means to garner sympathy, always complaining of migraines whenever she didn’t get her way. The adoration she eventually receives for her miraculous blog and app and cookbook is depicted visually as overwhelming waves of heart-eyes reactions ballooning from people’s phones. She describes her app, at one point, as “the best friend you’ve ever had.”

The show understands why a person like Belle would act this way, without defending her or asking us to empathize. It is, more often than not, quite mean. Even Dever’s portrayal (whose Aussie accent, to my untrained American ear, sounds pretty good) is marked by an irritatingly soft, wheedling voice, like a singer in a commercial begging you for donations to an animal shelter. It implicates the viewer with occasional fourth-wall breaks and a general thesis that the system itself encourages the flaying open of oneself, the monetization of trauma, the obsessive rivalries and hateful social media K-holes, how one lie can throw every other truth into doubt.

It’s not a perfect show, and is often clumsy, especially in its double-timeline structure that constantly bounces back and forth from origins to present day with very little delineation. Keeping up with when everything is supposed to be becomes exhausting after the first couple of episodes (all but one of which are over an hour), and everything feels like it takes about twice as long as it should.

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So will Apple Cider Vinegar be Netflix’s new Inventing Anna smash? It’s unlikely that any story in this genre can compete with the wild and juicy details of the Anna Delvey saga, which had much more mainstream recognition at the time the series aired than Gibson’s story does.

But, as the streaming service’s latest entry into its cinematic universe of scammers, Apple Cider Vinegar is an appropriately sour addition to the clique.

Emma Stefansky

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