Here’s a sign of the times: as I’m writing this review of “Apple Cider Vinegar,” a Netflix series about a woman who achieved internet celebrity by faking a battle with cancer, my colleague is reviewing “Scamanda,” an ABC series about a woman who achieved internet celebrity by faking a battle with cancer. (Both of these shows follow last fall’s “Anatomy of Lies,” the Peacock docuseries about “Grey’s Anatomy” writer Elisabeth Finch, who ran a slightly smaller-scale version of the same deceit.) The confluence of wellness culture, medical misinformation and social media — the noxious brew that’s propelled vaccine “skeptic” Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. to a cabinet nomination — has produced plenty of inspiration for Hollywood. But the flip side of such ample source material is that it’s hard to put one’s own stamp on such a ubiquitous trend. Despite a strong central performance, “Apple Cider Vinegar” ends up being a case in point.
The limited series retells the rise and fall of Belle Gibson, an Australian influencer who used a host of fictional ailments — including heart problems, seizures, and Stage 4 brain cancer — to market a healthy eating app. If Gibson could cure her nonexistent illnesses by abstaining from sugar, gluten, red meat and other “toxins,” the spiel went, then so could her readers. The sole American in the cast, Kaitlyn Dever, is also the star, playing Gibson with a thoroughly convincing (to this Yank, at least) accent and the high-pitched hysteria of a Chloe Fineman character on “Saturday Night Live.” After dramatic turns in “Unbelievable” and “Dopesick,” the latter of which earned her an Emmy nomination, Dever gets to hit more comic notes here. Gibson’s scheme was serious, defrauding donors and causing acute distress to her loved ones. But the way her lies manifest is often laughably absurd, like claiming she’s left medical records that could prove her diagnosis at her estranged mother’s house. The emotionally withholding dog ate her homework!
Gibson’s house of cards came crashing down in 2015, the same year journalist John Carreyrou began publishing his investigations into Theranos — the biotech company whose founder, Elizabeth Holmes, is now synonymous with bluffing one’s way to the top. “Apple Cider Vinegar” is thus placed in the same gargantuan shoes as “The Dropout,” the award-winning Hulu series built around Amanda Seyfried’s chilling portrait of a sociopath enabled by founder worship. Even at its best, “Apple Cider Vinegar” strikes many of the same chords as other entries in the scammer canon. And often, the show falls short of its own peak thanks to an unfocused structure that diffuses much of its message.
Created by Samantha Strauss (“Nine Perfect Strangers”), “Apple Cider Vinegar” fractures its narrative over time. Some of the show looks backward from the other side of Gibson’s downfall, while some moves forward from her humble origins and still more takes place in media res, at her apex. It can be confusing what’s happening when, all the more so because “Apple Cider Vinegar” can’t decide on a framing device. Gibson baring her soul to a crisis PR rep is one promising angle; a pair of journalists racing to debunk her lies by interviewing witnesses like Gibson’s ex-manager Chanelle (Aisha Dee, late of “The Bold Type”) is another. But by failing to settle conclusively on either, the plot ends up less than the sum of its parts. There’s little suspense around whether the investigators will succeed, for example, because we’ve already seen the results.
“Apple Cider Vinegar” surrounds Gibson with fictional and composite characters to illustrate the human cost of her pathological lies. As with the competing frameworks, though, these figures tend to muddle the series’ message more than they augment it. Gibson models herself after fellow cancer blogger Milla Blake (Alycea Debnam-Carey), who rises to fame by chronicling her pursuit of “alternative” medicines like coffee enemas and juice cleanses over chemotherapy, radiation or surgery. Milla is far more well-meaning than her groupie-turned-rival, and therefore more of a tragic figure. “Apple Cider Vinegar” is nonetheless critical of the world she’s drawn into out of an understandable frustration with the medical establishment, one awash with pseudoscience and conspiratorial thinking. Except Gibson’s inventions are so brazen that this more nuanced argument gets lost. Yes, Gibson tried to sell an intensely restrictive diet as a cure for a serious disease. But she also didn’t have the disease in the first place, making her lesser sins and more ambiguous figures like Blake pale in comparison.
A more instructive dynamic springs up between Gibson and her follower Lucy (Tilda Cobham-Harvey), who’s living with breast cancer. Gibson’s posts help sway — influence, even! — an already exhausted Lucy to abandon conventional treatment in favor of ayahuasca retreats and the like. Lucy’s husband, Justin (Mark Coles Smith), is one of the journalists who trains his sights on Gibson as a safer target for frustration than his spouse, and out of a vain hope discrediting Gibson will persuade Lucy to resume chemotherapy. The storyline is a moving way to give the cost of Gibson’s clout a human face, even if Lucy can sometimes get crowded out by the bigger personalities at play. She still delivers the most searing illustration of the paradox “Apple Cider Vinegar” works to underscore: blissed out in an Amazonian jungle, with the promise of more enlightenment around the corner, she inserts her credit card into a reader, a bit of crass commercialism intruding on what isn’t meant to be monetized.
Gibson is still an imperfect, if attention-grabbing, vehicle into a wider survey of why people, especially women, are so drawn to snake oil. Her self-delusion is so extreme that it’s easy to see as sui generis, despite the show’s efforts to place Gibson in context. Ironically, her hustle pales in comparison to that of a multibillion-dollar industry built on false hopes, but ends up eclipsing the larger problem anyway.
All six episodes of “Apple Cider Vinegar” are now streaming on Netflix.
