Series Review: "The Way Down: God, Greed and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin" (2021-22).

"We are all made in her image". This is The Way Down: God, Greed and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin. This documentary television miniseries directed by Marina Zenovich. After rising to fame with her Weigh Down Workshop, a Christian-based diet program that preached slenderness as next to godliness, Gwen Shamblin Lara founded the Tennessee-based church. Despite a carefully curated image, Lara and the church soon fielded accusations of emotional, psychological, and physical abuse, and exploitation for their alleged cult-like practices. Encompassing years of investigation and extensive interviews with former members and others personally impacted.

On February 18, 1955, American author, founder of the Christian diet program The Weigh Down Workshop and founder of the Remnant Fellowship, Gwen Shamblin Lara was born. In 1980, Lara began a weight control consulting practice. She counseled that genetics, metabolism and behavior modification did not explain why some people were thin while others were overweight. In 1986, Lara founded the Weigh Down Workshop, a weight loss program with no food restrictions, exercise regimens or weigh-ins, or calorie counting. The program was offered in about six-hundred churches in thirty-five U.S. states by 1994. The program was in more than one-thousand churches in forty-nine states, Great Britain and Canada by January 1995. The program had grown to about five-thousand churches, with about 10% located in Lara's home state of Tennessee, by July 1996. About eight churches in Britain were hosting workshops in December 1996. In 1996, Weigh Down Workshop had a staff of forty and built a headquarters in Franklin, Tennessee, and Lara began hosting an annual summer convention, Desert Oasis, in the Nashville area. Weigh Down Workshop hosted more than twenty one thousand classes with more than two hunderd and fifty thousand participants worldwide by August 1998. Classes were hosted in every U.S. state and in Canada and Europe. In 1999, Lara founded the Remnant Fellowship Church in Franklin, Tennessee in 1999. The church's building was completed in 2004 on forty acres Lara purchased in Brentwood, Tennessee. On May 29, 2021, Lara and six church leaders, including her husband Joe and son-in-law Brandon Hannah, were killed when her 1982 Cessna Citation 501 private jet, bound for Palm Beach, Florida, crashed into Percy Priest Lake near Smyrna, Tennessee, shortly after takeoff.

Executive Producer Nile Cappello began researching Lara and The Remnant Fellowship, spending months getting to know former members. Cappello brought the project to Campfire, who agreed to produce the series, and hired Zenovich to direct. The producers had reached out to Lara and The Remnant Fellowship for an interview, but all declined. However, during the final stages of post-production on the series, Lara died in a plane crash. Afterward, people who had been unwilling to speak about their experiences with Lara and The Remnant Fellowship reached out to Zenovich.

By the time you finish watching the series, you may still come away from it hating the woman, but you will most likely come away from it thinking that she and her legacy are far more complex that you might have thought going in.

Simon says The Way Down: God, Greed and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin receives:

Also, see my review for What Happens in Hollywood.