Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Way Down’ on HBO Max, a Documentary Series About a Cult Leader That the Cult of Cult-Expose Watchers Will Love

HBO Max documentary series The Way Down: God, Greed and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin was in the midst of production when its subject, weight loss guru and Christian cult leader Gwen Shamblin Lara, died in a plane crash. Director Marina Zenovich subsequently reworked the project from four episodes to five, with three debuting now and two arriving in 2022. Shamblin and six other leaders of the Remnant Fellowship church in Brentwood, Tenn. perished in the May, 2021 accident, and now the series opens with that development.

THE WAY DOWN: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A drone shot of Percy Priest Lake near Nashville, where the plane went down.

The Gist: Narrative layer one: TV news footage details the crash that killed Shamblin. Layer two: TWO YEARS EARLIER, reads a subtitle. We see Shamblin answering questions during what appears to be a legal deposition. Layer three: Former Remnant members and family of current members describe how the church is like a cult; they describe Shamblin as a power-hungry self-proclaimed guru of sorts whose church is exclusionary and consists of “clones” of its leaders.

Layer four: It’s 1992. We hear Shamblin’s voice on a self-help cassette for her Weigh Down Workshop, a weight-loss regime she devised within a faith-based framework. She was an accredited nutritionist who grew up in a tightly conservative, Christian environment. Some described her workshop as a “miracle diet”; others called it simply “portion control.” The program was so popular, churches across the country began teaching/preaching the Weigh Down Workshop, which had grown into a successful media empire. To be thin was to be like God, she evangelized.

By the late ’90s, Shamblin was nationally known, doing book tours and making TV appearances, a Larry King interview being her largest platform. In 1999, she started her own church, Remnant Fellowship, and, per former members, she began insisting her Weigh Down philosophy was “the answer to all the world’s evils.” She was a white tiger of Christianity: a female church leader. She stirred controversy in two major ways: Saying starvation in Nazi prison camps was a model for weight loss, and by denying the Holy Trinity, a cornerstone of modern Christianity, in her Remnant preaching. One person says money, prestige and power, comprise Shamblin’s true Holy Trinity.

We get further testimonials on the cult-like grip Remnant has on its members, its most faithful recruits using deception and bullying to maintain its power. In 2018, Shamblin married Joe Cara, who has a young daughter from a previous relationship. We meet the girl’s mother, Natasha Pavlovich, who testifies that her daughter isn’t allowed outside Shamblin’s compound — and was willing to fight tooth and nail against Shamblin and Cara’s primary custody claim.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? We’ll see if The Way Down is as gripping as a pair of other HBO Max docuseries tackling cults: The Vow and Heaven’s Gate: Cult of Cults. See also, the feature doc Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief.

Our Take: Of course The Way Down is fascinating for being a cult-of-personality expose with a clear-cut villain who resembles Cruella de Vil shoved through the Christian Caucasian-o-Tron: transparent phoniness, gaudy fashion, hair up to here (and then some), won’t shut the hell up about God, etc. She married one cult-like phenomenon, Americans’ obsession with body image, with another, an exclusive branch of a branch of a Christian church, and one might say that’s an act of genius — albeit evil, diabolical genius. You will hate her face and her brain and her heart and you won’t feel bad about it.

Of course, she’s dead now, adding a wrinkle to the series, which puts that fact right up front, but otherwise has the annoying habit of building up to big reveals. The first episode hooks us with the Pavolovich twist; the second drops a shocker involving a death among Remnant followers (the details of which I won’t reveal, although it was a significant regional news story at the time). This type of structure tends to emphasize sensationalism and undermine the doc’s journalistic strengths — it’s what we in the biz call “burying the lede.”

Either way, it’ll be hard to watch one episode of The Way Down and not roll into the next ones. One might be tempted to say that documentaries about cults inspire cult followings themselves, members of which addictively consume real-life sagas like this — and true-crime docs, which kind of forged the path for cult-expose docs. Should we feel bad about directing schadenfreude at Shamblin, whose sinister influence will likely wane in the wake of her death? Maybe, although the act of not speaking ill of the dead is overrated when the dead person has done great ill to others. Should we feel oogy that series like this are so entertaining despite the very real suffering its subjects cause? A little, because exposes tend to be juicy and manipulative, but they also function as cautionary tales and acts of catharsis for participants who share their horror stories. You’ll wish Zenovich had tailored The Way Down with a less hyperbole and a more measured tone and approach, but nonetheless, this story is absolutely worthy of being told.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Pavlovich leans forward righteously and says, “(Shamblin) expected me to go away like all the others. Surprise! Surprise! I ain’t goin’ anywhere.”

Sleeper Star: The sleeper star here didn’t quite emerge until the final moments of this episode, when Pavlovich asserted herself as the protagonist of this story, the person willing to fight the villain, Shamblin.

Most Pilot-y Line: After answering several of the deposition interviewer’s questions quickly and confidently, Shamblin hesitates when facing this one: “To your knowledge, do any of the members of the Remnant Fellowship consider you to be a prophet?”

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Way Down is one part fascinating study of the human condition to one part guilty pleasure.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream The Way Down on HBO Max