Spoilers ahead for the first season of The Vow.

The Vow will go down as one of the worst docuseries in recent memory. Working from the captivating true story of NXIVM—a multi-level marketing scheme that turned out to also be a sex cult led by co-founder and leader Keith Raniere—filmmakers Karim Amer and Jehane Nouhaim used a wealth of footage shot by documentarian Mark Vicente and his fellow defectors Bonnie Piesse, Sarah Edmondson, and Anthony Ames, to tell a story about…it’s unclear. The first season (a second season has already been ordered) spanned nine hours, and at the end of it, the directors chose to end with a cliffhanger rather than any emotional or thematic resolution.

Perhaps a resolution was impossible with such a scattershot approach. The loose structure was watching core members like Mark and Sarah defect from NXIVM and then position themselves as “the rebels” who were working to bring down the organization from the outside. Amer and Nouhaim saw no problem with giving the defectors this new identity, never considering that part of the problem with NVIXM in the first place was how it played into people’s narcissism to make them ripe for molding by Raniere. NXIVM exploited the vanity of its members—people looking for self-improvement—and the main subjects here seem to still be on a self-improvement kick. There’s little humility here beyond “We were had,” and almost no thought given to their own complicity in being part of a pyramid scheme until that pyramid scheme revealed itself to be a sex cult.

the-vow-poster

But after nine hours, I could not really tell you what The Vow was about until its final moments. Those final moments didn’t tie anything together (again, an impossible task considering all the tangents and lack of structure in the documentary overall), but they did show the allegiances of the filmmakers, and that allegiance was to always be more titillating and alluring to the audience. In the final minutes, the filmmakers speak to an imprisoned Keith Raniere over the phone who wants his input on their documentary. And that’s where the season ends, so if you want to hear from Keith Raniere, you’ll have to come back for Season 2.

But isn’t Raniere the villain? Isn’t the problem that no one pushed back on him, and that he was already given hundreds of hours of camera time and millions of dollars to spew nonsense? After nine hours of The Vow, I feel like I have a pretty good picture of Raniere, and it’s not like he never got to speak for himself considering the wealth of footage that Vincente provided. But after seeing how he’s tormented others, the filmmakers still want to give him a platform? They still need to hear from him? That’s a tremendous insult to everyone who was victimized Raniere, but hey, it makes for good content, so let’s use him to sell a second season.

It’s so crass and grotesque, but more than that, it shows that the filmmakers never really had much sympathy for those Raniere victimized. They provided the color to NXIVM’s exploits, but their pain is really just a steppingstone to the next thing. When you have a docuseries like The Vow that has no clear thesis or concept of what it wants to say, then it doesn’t provide any gatekeeping. The series simply showed itself to be a catch-all for everything NXIVM, and it could be whatever it wanted for whoever had the camera on them at the time. For victims, it was a tale of Raniere’s power and wrath. For the defectors, it was a redemption narrative of how they escaped and brought down the evil empire. And now for Raniere, who knows what it will be, but the filmmakers have shown themselves to be an indifferent sounding board, so I imagine he’ll have plenty of airtime to defend himself without any pushback beyond what we’ve already seen, a counterforce that’s already diminished by assuming we still need to hear what Raniere—a bullshit artist if there ever was one—has to say.

The trap of the NXIVM story was that it was so juicy—it has sex, cults, and money. But there was a level of seriousness that this narrative demanded, and the filmmakers of The Vow were only able to stumble into that seriousness intermittently. More often than not, they were chasing the latest shiny object whether that’s was Raniere’s efforts to meet with the Dalai Lama or how NXIVM wielded the legal system to silence defectors. But over nine episodes, there was no real structure or larger theme, which probably made it really easy for the filmmakers to say, “Sure, this Keith Raniere guy is a monster, but let’s hear him out.”

Real people suffered due to NXIVM and Keith Raniere’s actions, but The Vow could never hold that thread for long as it jumped between topics seemingly at random, unable to edit out even the dullest footage, and ultimately failing at basic storytelling to where the viewer would leave more confused about NXIVM than when they started. The final minutes of the first season showed that the only thing we know for certain is that Season 2 of The Vow will somehow be even worse.