- Network: Netflix
- Series Premiere Date: Mar 16, 2022
Critic Reviews
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Well-paced and efficient, Bad Vegan sucks you into Melngailis's personal drama and keeps you there.
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An engrossing docuseries. ... Mr. Smith’s objective is the creation of mood, which he does quite successfully, punctuating an ethereal portrait of the confused Melngailis’s thought process with the recollections of her employees.
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Compelling endeavor. ... What emerges, then, is a concept of Melngailis as a woman who wasn’t just painfully gullible, and therefore susceptible to Strangis’ cult guru-like charms, but a self-interested huckster and dreamer who was constantly angling to keep herself afloat by any means necessary.
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While most true-crime documentaries rely on the heinous, grisly, and gruesome for kicks, Bad Vegan captures a substantive story with a lesson we can all chew on.
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Smith carefully chooses his interview subjects in a way that’s sympathetic to Melngailis. ... He smartly avoids sensational techniques, letting the people involved tell their stories in a way that's more tragic than tabloid.
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There’s a healthy dose of skepticism in “Bad Vegan” that helps it avoid framing this saga as a love story gone wrong, and maybe its most insightful decision is to emphasize how numbing that ratcheting strain becomes on Sarma herself.
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We really wish Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives. was less one-sided, but at least the side we see makes for an entertaining story.
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This is very much Melngailis’s show and she is allowed to skate too easily away from whether, when and how she could have – should have – realised what he was doing, and escaped his clutches.
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Bad Vegan, however, is a voyeuristically compelling story that’s ultimately more sad than scandalous. It left me feeling queasy and guilty, like I’d eaten an entire Domino's pizza with a side order of chicken wings.
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The elusiveness of answers about “why” — and the inability, then, to make “Bad Vegan” about bigger questions about truth or even about the specifics of Melngailis’ world — make the docuseries grow, eventually, frustrating; four hours is a long time to spend running through a specific set of facts with a hard limit as to how far we can explore.
User score distribution:
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Positive: 0 out of 5
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Mixed: 3 out of 5
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Negative: 2 out of 5
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May 5, 2022This show could of been a single episode of a true crime series . It simply was way way way to dragged out .
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Apr 1, 2022Rather dull documentary that suffers by only looking at this tale from one side.