Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Vow’ On HBO, A Docuseries About the NXIVM Organization And How It Was Revealed As A Sex Cult

The Vow, a nine-part docuseries directed by Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer, documents the NXIVM (pronounced “Nixium”) organization, how Raniere and co-founder Nancy Salzman attracted followers with their scientific-based approach to self-help, and how Raniere and actor Allison Mack were arrested on sex trafficking and racketeering charges. 

THE VOW: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: NXIVM co-founder Keith Raniere talks about what makes people heroes to the people that worship them.

The Gist: While Noujaim and Amer use extensive amounts of NXIVM training materials and inspirational videos to paint a picture of Raniere and Salzman, they interview a number of former members, most notably Mark Vicente, the director of the documentary What The Bleep Do We Know? and Sarah Edmondson. Both are reached advanced levels in the organization and were close to both Raniere and Salzman. “It was never my intent to destroy the organization,” Vicente says in a self-made video he made after he left the organization. “It’s just that I saw what was going on. And what I saw fucked with my head.”

In their interviews, as well as with Vicente’s wife Bonnie Piesse, whom he met via the organization, they paint a picture of an organization that was admittedly cult-like — color-coded satin sashes denoted what “level” each person was at in the organization, and members were forced to call Salzman “Prefect” and Raniere “Vanguard”. But they also have very fond memories of their time there, which for Vicente was over 10 years. Vicente’s incentive to enter was the fact that Salzman and the organization’s wealthy benefactors, Sara and Claire Bronfman, could help him make any film he wanted.

For Edmonson and Piesse, both actors, it was the idea of “integrating” your emotions and self-doubts into self-actualization. Raniere, who went to Renssselaer Polytechnic Institute when he was 16 and is considered a genius, was offering a scientific method to this self-actualization, which inevitably leads participants to free themselves from their limiting habits, unlock potential and give them more joy in life. Salzman was the warm and charismatic face of the organization, as we see from a welcome video that looked like it was made around the time of the organization’s 1998 founding, and during sessions that she conducted with members. She had a way of opening people up like they’ve never been opened up before, getting to the heart of why they’re there seeking help.

At one point, NIXVM got so big that a number of actors got involved, including Smallville‘s Kristin Kreuk. Kreuk’s co-star, Allison Mack, was also in NXIVM, and was arrested in 2018 along with Raniere on sex trafficking, racketeering and other charges; she plead guilty to the racketeering charge. She’s briefly introduced in the first episode, but we’ll likely hear more about her as the series goes on.

Our Take: The first hour of The Vow went very quickly, not just because the subject matter was so interesting, but we were wondering the whole time how accomplished and intelligent people like Vicente could get sucked in by Raniere and Salzman. But after the hour, we understood it a little more. Raniere wasn’t particularly charismatic, but he saw the world in a way that most people did not, and his theories and research intrigued people interested in scientific approaches to improving their lives. Salzman was savvy and whip-smart, but had a charm and warmth that balanced out Raniere’s more standoffish personality.

And that’s the part of The Vow that will keep us watching. From the outside, some of the silliness of these NXIVM meetings, like the colored sashes with level stripes on them, the sideways sandwich handshake they give everyone, the extreme emotional commitment the members gave the organization and its leaders, looks like any other story of any other cult we’ve ever seen. Hell, it doesn’t veer all that far off from the depiction of the cult that Yvonne Strahovski’s character is running away from in the Australian series Stateless.

But the fact that Raniere took what could be seen as a calculated, logical, scientific approach to his program fascinates us even more. When you hear him talk, he sounds less like a motivational speaker and more like a college professor or a wonky tech CEO, explaining his theories of “integration” in the same bland way that Mark Zuckerberg talks about a new, completely invasive new feature on Facebook.

How Piesse finds out about what’s going on in the women-focused NXIVM subsidiary where Mack and Rainere were either having sex with underage women or trafficking women out for sex, and even branding them with Mack’s and Rainere’s initials, and how the FBI caught up with Mack and Rainere, will be the most fascinating parts to watch.

Sex and Skin: We haven’t gotten to the part about the organization’s sex trafficking, but we’ll get there eventually.

Parting Shot: Piesse is walking and smoking in what looks like her neighborhood after dark; we hear her phone call to Vicente, where she says, “When I look at these women, they’re all not doing well. And I think some things are going to crumble.”

Sleeper Star: Edmondson stands out because of how skeptical she was of the organization during the first days of her five-day orientation. She even made fun of Salzman’s eyebrows in the cheesily-made welcome video that NXIVM made in the late ’90s.

Most Pilot-y Line: We know this is a stylistic choice by the directors, but seeing the interviewers shoulder or other body part in the corner of the screen during their interviews takes us out of them a bit; it changes the dynamic from a person talking directly to us to a person talking to someone else. You might think that’s a little thing, but once you notice it, you can’t un-notice it.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Vow benefits from access to people like Vicente and Edmondson, plus lots of footage from various NXIVM organizational videos, meetings, and other insightful stuff. It creates a picture of the organization that makes it more than just the “sex cult” that was in headlines about it in 2018.

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, VanityFair.com, Playboy.com, Fast Company.com, RollingStone.com, Billboard and elsewhere.

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