In an era of peak polarization, when our country has allegedly never been more divided, surely we can all agree on at least one thing: HBO’s The Vow was way too long. Somewhere along our nine-hour journey with NXIVM, the most weirdly banal sex cult ever led by a volleyball enthusiast, our gaze turned from horrified to frustrated. “The Vow is 198 episodes too long,” read one recent social media crack. With the series now renewed for a second season, directors Karim Amer and Jehane Noujaim get to extend the journey for another round, even as they face online dissent. 

“The Vow on HBO is 5 episodes too long,” read another tweet. “I’m bored but committed.”

And another: “Anyone else feel like The Vow is about a month too long? I swear I’ve been watching it since the start of summer.”

We kept watching, of course. We had to see how it ended, and—given the ghastliness of the crimes perpetrated, the multilayered schemes, the seductive manipulations—there is no disputing the story’s worth. But the irritation here is simple. How could a docuseries about such a tantalizing subject—Keith Raniere, a bespectacled, sweatpants-wearing life coach with a butt cut who turned out to be a sex-cult Svengali, brainwashing women into being branded like cattle—manage to get boring?

Let us count the ways: through endless repetition of the mundane details of the lives, phone calls, meetings, neighborhood walks, and coffee talks of a handful of escapees looking to take NXIVM down. It didn’t help that there was so much confusingly similar footage throughout the series. The Vow was compelling yet exhaustive, detailed yet drawn out, resonant but repetitive. Most of all, this tale of largely white, upper-middle-class men and women eager to self-improve with the organization’s Executive Success Programs, or ESP, and handing over their money, trust, and collateral, time-line-jumped us into whiplash, proving that even evil can lose its shock if you show it quietly pontificating in enough intimate couch chats.

To be clear, some of the techniques listed above also worked for The Vow. The series’ use of slow-burn immersion in the pedestrian did one thing extremely well: It let its subjects scream, “Look, we’re normal people, just like you! We just wanted to work on our limiting beliefs!” It forced the viewer into the mindset of how ESP and NXIVM could appear not just innocuous, but even like a godsend for some members. These were “regular” people looking for a little self-help, who very often knew little of the society’s secret inner workings until it was too late.

The more time we spent with them at home, talking, thinking, regretting, and investigating, the more we came to understand that the frog-in-boiling-water analogy was extremely apt. No one runs head-first into a sex cult with a flesh-cauterizing fetish, yet many people, it turns out, will inadvertently find themselves part of one masquerading as a chill self-improvement community if you just load the front end with corporate-retreat vibes.

But still, nine hours? Viewers riveted by the subject and deeply compassionate toward its victims, but bleary-eyed by the immersion, are beginning to wonder how much more of this hot mess they can take.

Seduced, a four-part Starz docuseries also about NXIVM (ahem, there’s a podcast too), told the same basic story through former member India Oxenberg. It was everything The Vow wasn’t: The October 18 premiere gave us a straightforward, largely linear tale with a tighter, more efficient delivery, plus more to-the-point backstory on Raniere’s history of predatory behavior. Most importantly, it provided cult experts to lay bare how dangerous Raniere really was. Memorably, Oxenberg’s grandmother and those experts stepped in to call clear, hard bullshit on the entire organization. “After 30 minutes of Seduced, I’ve already learned more and haven’t had to watch anybody packing or cooking dinner,” another recent tweet read.

Given the trend of long-runners such as Making a Murderer, Tiger King, and Wormwood, among others in the last five years, and the hot market here and abroad for documentaries, there appears to be little chance of stuffing this long-winded genie back in its bottle.

So how did we get here, to a nine-part docuseries on a subject that easily could’ve been explored in half or a third of the time? Documentaries were once staid affairs that viewers treated like eating their cultural vegetables. Errol Morris and Ken Burns elevated them into cinematic narrative, only to see them given a provocative, if rakish, makeover by the likes of Super Size Me and Bowling for Columbine, which found a way to mainstream the difference.

The episodic documentary form of today—which is largely focused on true crime but also engages other subjects, as in the compelling entries Cheer and The Last Dance—is the spawn of shock docs and true-crime podcasts such as Serial, born into a binge-watcher’s world. Add our affection for the lurid and thirst for consumption driving the need for content, and you see docuseries forced to keep pace with episodic binge TV (arguably also too long) bent toward chronicling the offbeat, criminal, and strange, those margins we love to gawk at with a voracious appetite for every sickening detail.

One of the first to do all the above over a long haul was 2015’s The Jinx, Andrew Jarecki’s six-part saga of Robert Durst’s involvement in the then unsolved murders of his wife, friend, and neighbor. A nail-biter drawn off a mass of footage, interviews, and documents, the show was gifted a ratings surge when Durst himself was arrested in real life just a day before the jaw-dropper of a finale aired. (Durst has pleaded not guilty, and his trial has been postponed until spring 2021.)

But The Jinx skillfully accomplished what The Vow did not: a mastery of the avalanche of footage and time line leaps that never left us stuck in the extremely myopic tedium of coordinating a takedown.

About that footage. Amer and Noujaim were privy to a mountain of it—years of the inner workings of the organization and the lives of its members, all meticulously catalogued by filmmaker and former ESP guy Mark Vicente, who, coincidentally, features prominently in the docuseries. There’s no doubt it was challenging to whittle that much tape into shape, but Amer and Noujaim appear to have not only cut very little, but repeated a great deal. Each episode contained extended scenes from earlier installments, leaving us with an on-loop origin story via the experience of member and early whistleblower Sarah Edmondson and others, as well as multiple shots of the same conversation with the Dalai Lama, footage of Smallville actor Allison Mack’s first meeting with Raniere, and so many seemingly identical shots of phone calls and subjects peering into screens that it was impossible to tell if you’d seen them before (it certainly felt that way). I frequently had to check to make sure I hadn’t accidentally jumped back and ended up rewatching an earlier episode.

That lack of outsider perspective with The Vow brought more skepticism, suggesting the length was not only intentional, but potentially misleading: “The Vow is such a frustrating documentary,” one tweet went. “It is way too long and seems to become increasingly staged in an effort to absolve former members as the show progresses.” 

The Vow isn’t the only true-crime docuseries to test our appetite for the granular. We’ve willingly consumed plenty of hours-long binges over the last five years with varying degrees of complaint. Tiger King’s eight-episode blitz left us bewildered and entertained but overfed; it too used a time-line-jumping mass of footage that wrung every tidbit out with zeal. The six-part I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, a look at unraveling the identity of the Golden State Killer, was a tidy stunner, yet four parts for the Jeffrey Epstein: Filthy Rich docuseries felt like forced dilution of an already-thin story with little new information. The recent four-part Love Fraud showcased both the perks and pitfalls of the labyrinthine process of unraveling a true-crime yarn, intercutting static spans of all the sitting around and waiting that stakeouts demand, but quickly patching us back in when something worthwhile happened.

Documentarians often say the story dictates the format, but given the influx of docuseries filling slots alongside traditional binge-y sitcoms and dramas, it’s clear that the format is often dictating the story. In a recent look at the docuseries’ similarities to reality TV, New York magazine’s Kathryn VanArendonk noticed that the editing work of one episode of The Vow had her hooked like a Real Housewives episode. Just as we saw network TV embrace premium television’s prestige signifiers, she wrote, so are we now seeing gussied-up reality TV masquerading as prestige documentary television. She spoke to Amer about the success of The Vow, noting:

Docuseries have become so “in vogue,” The Vow’s Karim Amer told me, that turning a documentary-film project into a series can be the easiest way to get it made, even if that means stretching it out unnecessarily into a series-length format. But the underlying fuel for the docuseries boom, Amer thinks, is that “we are living in a crazy time.” “People want to go deeper,” he said. “The documentary series is in many ways the new novel, [like] the way that Dickens would write long stories. People want to feel like they’re going chapter by chapter into worlds.”

That may be, but that also means our appetite and the industry drivers are threatening to outpace the demands of the story, and that documentarians themselves are merely forced to play ball. The result of all this will certainly sometimes take us deeper into a satisfying tale, but often leave us wanting the more we never got, or far less than we were given.

For what it’s worth, the second season of The Vow will tackle, as one would expect, the trial of Raniere. This is a perfectly valid subject for a second season. But if it’s nine more hours, we’re just hoping that this time we’re not held hostage by what feels like every second of that story, all the way down to the bathroom breaks.

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