Wait. Haven’t I seen this before?
You’d be forgiven for thinking you’ve already watched Netflix’s new mini-series “Apple Cider Vinegar.” Multiple times.
It stars the fantastic Kaitlyn Dever as Belle Gibson, an Australian scammer who faked a cancer diagnosis, claimed she cured herself through dieting and then made bank as a bogus wellness guru. She finally came clean in 2015, and was fined $250,000 for her misdeeds.
It’s the latest juicy show about a real, beautiful woman who lies through her teeth to pad her coffers, becomes famous and then is destroyed after being exposed by pesky journalists.
We can’t get enough of them.
In 2022, there was “Inventing Anna,” Shonda Rhimes’ take on Manhattan’s fake German heiress Anna Delvey (played by Julia Garner), who conned banks, hotels, friends and investors into supporting her life of luxury. She went to prison, wound up in house arrest across from my laundromat and did a rather blase stint on “Dancing with the Stars.”
One month later came “The Dropout,” the story of spooky Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes (Amanda Seyfried). A charismatic young medical CEO who aspired to be Steve Jobs and seemingly never blinked, she convinced deep-pocketed individuals to fund her “groundbreaking” blood-testing device to the tune of $700 million. Whoops. The machine didn’t actually work. Holmes is currently serving an 11 ¼-year prison sentence.
The two strange and transfixing women exploded in popularity after their binge-watches debuted. On Halloween that year, Holmes’ blonde hair and black turtleneck was a common costume. And Delvey, so quotable and forthright, was a meme for months. Convicted criminals were pop culture stars. America was obsessed with them.
Of course, stories about con-artists and fraudsters are nothing new. But the perps have changed along with society. The rise of social media over the past 20 years has given different kinds of narcissistic lunatics — younger, hotter — a major platform to easily swindle millions of gullible followers. Influencer status, for some, has been a slippery slope to the clink.
And, to state the obvious, Belle Gibson, Anna Delvey and Elizabeth Holmes are much more fun than Richard Dreyfuss and Robert De Niro playing Bernie Madoff.
Everybody enjoys watching attractive people. And we revel in it even more when they get punished for doing terrible things. Sexy schadenfreude. Not to mention there’s our fascination as to why the genetically gifted would risk it all in the first place. We marvel at their bottomless supply of confidence as they dupe everybody with insane fibs.
Gibson, for example, wildly insisted she had cancer of the brain, blood, spleen, uterine, liver and kidney, and that it all magically went away thanks to green juice.
Zero-percent true.
Now, that is a show I want to watch.
And these roles’ appeal for actors can’t be overstated. They are meaty, psychologically complex parts — Hannibal Lecters without the cannibalism — that have eccentric personalities and “I’d like to thank the academy” emotional breakdowns. Both Seyfried and Garner were nominated against each other at the Emmys in 2022. Seyfried, who gave us the best five minutes in the last several years of TV, rightly won.
When something works, Hollywood loves to repeat it. Case in point: This week, I suffered through my 35th Marvel movie. Trends get overstretched and exhausted. We will eventually reach critical mass with the fabulous fabulists.
But, for now, I’m rather liking these murder-free, shock-filled tales of narcissistic psychopaths. Give me the rise and fall of Belle Gibson over yet another pretty-boy serial killer TV show any day of the week.
