Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Program: Cons, Cults And Kidnapping’ On Netflix, A Docuseries Where Former Students Revisit A Disciplinary School That Was A Torture Chamber

The Program: Cons, Cults And Kidnapping is a three-part docuseries directed by Katherine Kubler; in the series, she goes back to The Academy at Ivy Ridge in Ogdensburg, NY with a group of fellow former students to find evidence of the abuse and other horrors that took place there before it was closed for good in 2009.

THE PROGRAM: CONS, CULTS AND KIDNAPPING: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: A group of people approach an abandoned building in what looks like the early morning. Some are extremely anxious to even go inside.

The Gist: Ivy Ridge was a disciplinary boarding school, where parents would send their “problem” teens. There, the teens are put in a multi-level program that’s intended as a behavior modification system. Students had to follow dozens upon dozens of rules, including rules like not looking out the window, or speaking to other students, or even smiling. Students had to walk in militaristic formations. Any violation of these rules would lead to a “correction” that would subtract from the points you earned by following the rules. You don’t move up levels until you get to a certain point level, so some students who refused to play along stayed in the program for years instead of months.

But as Kubler, who was sent there in 2004 when she was 16 because she was caught with a Mike’s Hard Lemonade at her previous boarding school, details, Ivy Ridge was less a school and more a juvenile detention center with less regulation. When parents send their kids there, the teens are grabbed by burly workers in front of their emotionless parents, loaded in a car and driven up to Ogdensburg.

Kubler and the fellow students that explore the abandoned school find files and videos that document the abuse, usually in the form of “restraint” actions, “interventions” that was more like solitary confinement, and more. It had gotten so bad on the boys’ side of the school that they started a riot in 2005. Quintin, one of the instigators of the riot, as arrested, and he tells Kubler that jail was like “a five-star Hilton hotel” compared to Ivy Ridge.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? The first-person-experience point of view of Kubler, who seemed to be destined to be a filmmaker from when she was a kid toting around a camcorder, reminds us of the recent docuseries Telemarketers.

Our Take: The Program: Cons, Cults And Kidnapping is fascinating on a number of levels. As a study of a harrowing, corrupt and abusive program that parents sent their “problem” teens to, it’s harrowing to hear about just the kind of things that Ivy Ridge and schools like it were able to get away with due to lack of oversight. But on the other hand, it’s an interesting study in perseverance, as Kubler and the classmates she explores the abandoned school with have come out the other side of this shared experience with a “if you don’t laugh, you cry” attitude that doesn’t necessarily heal the emotional and mental scars that were inflicted by Ivy Ridge, but shows that they’re not running away and hiding, either.

One aspect of the story that Kubler doesn’t really go into is exactly the circumstances that sent her fellow Ivy Ridge alumni to the school. She talks about who she was as a teen and why her behavior drifted into some typical teen territory, namely drinking and sneaking out, mostly in response to her borderline-verbally-abusive stepmother. When she details some of the letters she sent home — the only contact she was allowed to have with family, aside from a monthly phone call — she reads passages where her younger self wonders exactly what she did to be sent to Ivy Ridge and what she needs to do to come home.

But she really doesn’t explain why the other people she talked to were sent there. It might not really matter; it’s apparent that the way these teens were treated at Ivy Ridge far outweighed whatever transgression got these kids sent there. Still, it would have been a good way to illustrate the types of parents would be so desperate as to send their teen to a place like Ivy Ridge, and how little idea they had about what was really going on there.

What we really appreciated was how Kubler is able to vacillate between gallows humor and stark seriousness and make both of them flow together well. She wears an Ivy Ridge t-shirt while searching through the abandoned files; she opens a Mike’s Hard Lemonade, the drink that sent her there, and calls it the “darkest Mike’s ad ever.” But she also leaves her camera on classmates who talk about abuse in the “no camera room” or sexual assault from staff members that give them attention that’s not about levying “corrections.” Then we see the women alumni trying on uniform skirts they found in the debris and pretending that they’re teens again. That dark humor doesn’t lighten the heavy content, nor should it. But it does show just how strong it is as a coping mechanism.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: A reporter who exposed the Ivy Ridge program says, “What concerned me most about the program wasn’t the kids who were broken by it, but the kids that were successful.”

Sleeper Star: Diana spent three-and-a-half years at Ivy Ridge because she refused to live by their rules. The way she describes how the staff members took it as a challenge to be the one to break her is horrifying, but the fact that she’s not a complete basket case while recalling this experience is remarkable.

Most Pilot-y Line: Kubler eagerly interviews an administrator named “Miss Sissy” when she finds her at a local diner. Sissy is about to say something interesting about dealing with the gay female students when they’re kicked out of the diner — one of the waitresses was a relative of one of the other administrators. For some reason, either Kubler doesn’t continue the interview elsewhere or decided not to show it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Program: Cons, Cults And Kidnapping does a good job of showing the harrowing conditions at the Academy at Ivy Ridge and other disciplinary schools, while also showing the resiliency of the people who were sent there and endured those conditions.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.