“The following is inspired by a true story. Certain characters and events have been created or fictionalized.”
These words are written on the screen before every episode of “Apple Cider Vinegar.” The show goes to great lengths to make this clear, even breaking the fourth wall to do so. In nearly every episode, a character will turn to the screen and speak directly to the audience in order to convey this message. Sometimes a character will say, “This is a true story.” Other times they’ll say, “This is a true-ish story.” One character even goes so far as to say, “This is not a true story, full disclaimer.” Although all these statements are seemingly different in meaning, they all convey the same general idea: “Apple Cider Vinegar,” although based on a real controversy, is not entirely accurate.
Netflix has found success in this true-ish genre before with critically acclaimed shows like “Baby Reindeer” and “Inventing Anna,” all stories inspired by real life events but taking certain liberties in the truth for the sake of storytelling. It appears that with “Apple Cider Vinegar,” Netflix is continuing this trend. The story centers around real-life figure Belle Gibson (Kaitlyn Dever, “Booksmart”), a popular wellness influencer who built a substantial online platform by sharing her health journey after being diagnosed with life-threatening brain cancer. Her fame and influence grew from her dedication to curing her illness through healthy eating habits and alternative medicine, going so far as to create a food-tracking app, The Whole Pantry. There was only one problem — she didn’t actually have brain cancer.
“Apple Cider Vinegar” features the narratives of four women — Belle, Milla Blake (Alycia Debnam-Carey, “Fear the Walking Dead”), Chanelle (Aisha Dee, “Safe Home”) and Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Hervey, “The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart”) — to tell the story of the 2015 controversy. As Belle grows her online following, she forges a competitive rivalry with fellow influencer and authentic cancer survivor Milla. Chanelle, a manager and lifelong friend of Milla, begins taking notice of Belle’s many fabrications before piecing together the truth. All the while, Lucy struggles with her own mortality as she navigates her breast cancer diagnosis and is inspired by Belle to forgo conventional medicine in favor of alternative healing.
It is these four plotlines that make the true-ish element of “Apple Cider Vinegar” abundantly clear. While Netflix treats Belle with great care and tells her story faithfully, Milla is a fictional character heavily based on real-life figure Jessica Ainscough. Chanelle is based on a friend of Belle’s, but is heavily edited to better serve the story, and Lucy is entirely fictional.
On a narrative level, these decisions work strongly in the show’s favor. Aided by a competent script and stellar acting from the whole cast, the four plotlines weave together a story that struggles to move through a timeline cohesively, often jumping from past to present at a nauseating rate. The rivalry between Belle and Milla sparks tension as the characters begin to parse through Belle’s lies, and Chanelle serves as a connection between the two women throughout the stages of their lives featured in the story. Meanwhile, Lucy’s story of entering, abandoning and re-entering conventional cancer therapy highlights the real-world consequences of Belle’s actions.
However, the question of where the inspiration ends and the “true story” becomes a struggle the more you watch. Although inspired by real events, three out of these four characters have been heavily edited for the sake of the drama. Ainscough, the real-life Milla, never had a rivalry with Belle, and the pair only communicated briefly online.
It’s easy to wave these decisions off as prioritizing an engaging story over a complete and total recreation of reality. After all, this isn’t a documentary, but a drama series. However, “Apple Cider Vinegar” tries to have its cake and eat it too by attempting to tackle this issue within the show itself. In episode three, Belle’s crisis manager, Hek (Phoenix Raei, “Tehran”), turns to the audience and gives them the usual spiel: “This is a true-ish story based on a lie,” he says. But rather than turning away from the camera and continuing the scene, he continues to stare into the eyes of the viewer and asks, “Do you care? Should you?”
This is where my mounting frustration with “Apple Cider Vinegar’s” identity problem began.
As if embarrassed to be true-ish, “Apple Cider Vinegar” attempts to use self-awareness in order to comment on the genre’s shortcomings. The show attempts to add nuance to the genre itself while still existing within the genre. It almost feels like lampshading, attempting to mitigate any ethical concerns about narrativizing a real-life event by pushing the dilemma onto the viewers: Does it really matter if the story isn’t true as long as you like it?
A similar issue appears in episode six, where a 12-year-old Belle is about to enter the house of an older man. Before she closes the door, she turns to the camera and stops the scene entirely. “No,” she tells the viewer, “I’ve already given you a trauma origin story … You don’t need this. Why do you want it anyway?” In theory, young Belle raises a good point that is worth considering: the media’s obsession with trauma and our desperation to “peek behind the curtain” of a person’s personal life. But in practice, the showrunners have written a scene for the express purposes of telling the audience they shouldn’t want to watch it.
Frustratingly, “Apple Cider Vinegar” asks its audience to participate in the discourse of whether or not it’s right to tell a story in this style. It wants to insist on its fiction, all while using the actual name of Belle Gibson and following her life nearly beat by beat. It refuses to pick a lane, so it asks the viewers to choose for themselves, forcing the audience to be complicit in this moral quandary. In the end, this element of the story soured the experience for me and left a bad taste in my mouth as I finished the show. This was a tragic outcome, as the fictional story really did endear itself to me.
This is not to say “Apple Cider Vinegar” is a bad show — in all of its fictional elements, I really do think it had great qualities: Dever’s performance was a marvel to watch, many of the characters felt well-fleshed out and the unfolding drama was near impossible to look away from. It is to say, however, that the show is a terrible true story. And although the show avoids the label of true story like the plague, a true-ish story still feigns honesty.
Daily Arts Contributor Ana Torresarpi can be reached at atorresa@umich.edu.
