(Spoilers for Netflix’s Bad Vegan will be found below.)
Bad Vegan‘s a limited series with only four parts, but it’s apparently already doing huge numbers for Netflix. The show began streaming less than a week ago, and in five days, the latest scammer story — and perhaps the most what-the-hell-is-happening option in recent months — is telling the tale, alright. The show details how celebrity restauranteur Sarma Melngailis fell from grace and ended up (about five years ago) as a fugitive of the law (and then served time on Rikers Island). And people are gobbling it up, according to Netflix’s Top 10 Global chart.
That chart aims for transparency (after years of Netflix not being entirely clear about what “views” meant), and as of now, the show has reportedly accrued 26.96 million hours of streaming time over five days. That’s enough to bump it into the #5 spot on the global TV chart, and that could very well continue, considering how much conversation the show has generated already.
This controversy has (obviously) landed largely upon the show’s subject, Sarma, who declared that she felt “sick” over how Netflix was marketing the series, by “mocking” how she had fallen for the dog-immortality claim made by Anthony Strangis (who she initially knew as “Shane Fox”). Sarma claims that Strangis lured her into coercive control while progressively coaxing her to withdraw sums (from her restaurants) and take out loans from investors. She subsequently insisted that all her Netflix dollars went towards paying employees back.
Sarma has also expressed concern that the ending of the series “is disturbingly misleading” because it (arguably) creates the appearance that she’s still in contact with Strangis. Series director Chris Smith and executive producer Ryann Frase have defended their decision to end the show that way, claiming that the ending makes their subject appear “to be confident and strong.”
Bad Vegan is currently streaming on Netflix.