Apple Cider Vinegar is Anatomy of Lies for the MAHA set
the true crime that's worth your time
On the surface, the case of Belle Gibson doesn't have enough meat on its bones to justify a one-off true crime feature, let alone a full series. The Australian social media influencer's greatest crimes were that she claimed (on multiple occasions) to have cancer when she allegedly did not, and that she made promises to donate profits from her (successful!) business ventures to charitable efforts then failed to deliver. So when I opened Apple Cider Vinegar's page on Netflix and saw that it was six godamn episodes, I grooooaaned. Six freakin' eps of yet another show about yet another woman who allegedly filled the void within herself by claiming to have a fatal disease?
I texted my husband to say "I'm going to need a big-ass Americano and a box of pastries to get through this one," and then I got to work, if by "work," you mean watching ascending true crime queen Kaitlyn Dever (Dopesick! Unbelievable! Boy I wish Justified was based on fact!) adopt an extremely convincing (I think? Australian people, please weigh in here) accent to portray Gibson, who — the show tells us at the beginning of every episode — was not financially compensated by the production.
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The other thing the show repeatedly tells us, often by characters who shatter the fourth wall as they do — is that Apple Cider Vinegar is based on a true story, but the series, itself, isn't true. It's a lantern-hanging move that can feel both bold and disingenuous, sort of like that person you know who admits to being an asshole. You admire their self-awareness, but you also suspect that they use that admission as a feint to avoid the hard work of just not being an asshole. After a while, you start to wonder if they just ran the numbers and decided that being open about their character hole would get them further than patching it up.
I definitely think that's the case with Apple Cider Vinegar, and ultimately, I also think that's OK. A straightforward telling of the story might be this: Tasmania-born Belle Gibson allegedly (man, my shirt is getting a workout with this one) made claims via social media that she had terminal cancer, saying that she was surviving the disease by way of a variety of pseudoscientific and alternative treatments.
Her allegedly false claims were convincing enough that she was able to parlay a growing online following into a compaany that created a health and wellness app called The Whole Pantry, which was voted Apple's Best Food and Drink App of 2013. Eventually, people (including some reporters) started wondering why Gibson seemed like she didn't really have cancer, using questions about promises she'd made around her company's charitable intentions to find their way into the story. After all, proving that someone doesn't have cancer is very hard to do unless the person who has been saying they have cancer admits they all made it up.
Gibson hasn't done that, nor has she been convicted of any criminal acts. So if you have a Best Evidence drinking game going where you take a shot every time we say "allegedly," you should probably call the ambulance now, because alcohol poisoning is in your very near future.
It's juicy internet goss, sure. It's Milkshake Duck meets Elizabeth Sparkle. It's a story that booms big on TikTok for a weekend, then heads to the bargain bin at the back of the dumpy strip mall dollar store that is the internet. But it's not six episodes of TV, not by itself.
That's probably why Apple Cider Vinegar bulks itself up with a couple doses of narrative psyllium husk. While Gibson is the central figure, no doubt, her story is intertwined with those of two other women: There's Milla Blake, another cancer/wellness influencer who eschews traditional medicine then learns her lesson far too late, a fictionalized character who at least partially mirrors the life of now-deceased blogger and influencer Jessica Ainscough. Then there's a completely fabricated cafe staffer with breast cancer who follows Gibson online, much to the dismay of her reporter husband. And guess who that husband decides to make the focus of his investagative reporting? Oh, you're so smart!
This isn't a slow burn series packed with shocking twists, as the filmmakers put the ending — that is, Gibson's downfall — at the front end of the show. It's a canny move, as it cuts off any second screen Googlers at the pass, and by plating up Gibson's disgrace at the very beginning, we can sit back watch it all unfurl.
But that constant jumping around in the timeline isn't just entertainingly jazzy flash and dazzle, as it also distracts from how slender the three braided plots are. Gibson, as fictiolanized in the show, is basically just a shitty narcissist. Blake is a pre-MAHA alt medicine ding-dong who is presented as saintly and beloved, even as she spouts nonsense and misinformation about food and medicine in between boasting about the five coffee enemas she does a day. The cancer-stricken cafe staffer is so thinly drawn that she doesn't get a full name, she's just Lucy, a woman who exists to make her partner mad enough to unmask Gibson. But you don't notice most of these shortfalls when you're nursing whiplash from various sstoryline stops between 2011 and 2015.
There's a real story here about what drives people — so frequently, women — to claim they have cancer when they don't. It's a question that Anatomy of Lies, last fall's docuseries about disgraced Gray's Anatomy writer Elizabeth Finch gamely attempted to answer (you might have read my review on that one). Scamanda, the ongoing ABC/Hulu docuseries about another cancer fabulist, Amanda Riley, will also tackle motive, I assume? (Only two episodes of the weekly show have dropped as of publication; I've only seen one as of this writing.)
Apple Cider Vinegar also offers some solid and believable speculation on what might have driven Gibson, theories that are bolstered by Dever's thoughtful and winning performance. But there's only so far they can responsibly take that speculation, which means Gibson gets to remain an arguably compelling enigma. So the other opportunity here is to explore exactly why people are so eager to fall for alternative medicine, fraudulent treatments, and unvetted apps. If you have ever been to a hospital, dealt with an insurance company, or seen a shitty doctor, you know exactly why they might!
But the show doesn't head down that road, a journey the filmmakers are perhaps saving that shoe leather for the inevitable flood of Luigi Mangione properties I am 100 percent ready to consume. Instead of opening up that can of MAHA worms (guys, the show barely even mentions opposition to vaccines) we get Lucy (no last name) accepting her cancer via a Peruvian ayahuasca trip (on her cafe salary? Or her husband's vast paycheck at his journalism job?).
The series veers away from the big picture implications of Gibson's success, as well as the online glee at her downfall, to its detriment as a piece of "serious" work, to be sure. The result of that omission is a fast-burning and propulsive series that leaves little behind when it's over. That's not a terrible thing, at least not in this case — I was interested enough that I hit "pause" when I got up to put my Americano (which I set aside, mid-sip, during one of the coffee enema scenes) into the fridge for later. But it's also not a great thing, especially when we live in an age when health and medicine are at a crucial turning point.
Making a palatable, engrossing drama about a Big Stakes Topic might not have been what Apple Cider Vinegar's makers signed up for when they started to develop this show, but it's where they are now — but as opposed to re-pivoting to make this for today's audience, they stuck with what they knew would work. Like our previously mentioned asshole pal, they likely ran the numbers to determine which approach might net the best outcome for the least effort, then went with that. That doesn't make Apple Cider Vinegar a series that actively makes the world worse. It just makes it a series that the world will likely forget by next week.