‘How to Become a Cult Leader’ Review: Smart Laughs and Missed Opportunities in Netflix’s Doc-Comedy Series

Daniel Fienberg
·5 min read
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Once you’ve spent six episodes snarking on the likes of Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, the idea of wringing wry laughter out of a few cult leaders must not seem intimidating.

At the same time, once you’ve spent six episodes snarking on the likes of Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler, how much challenge is there in poking fun at colorfully outsize personalities and their devoted followers when they’ve already been the butt of jokes for, in some cases, generations?

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Those two statements are, respectively, the principle behind and the primary limitation to Netflix’s new six-episode documentary-comedy How to Become a Cult Leader, a follow-up in tone, style and structure to 2021’s How to Become a Tyrant.

Boasting a common production team led by Jake Laufer, Jonas Bell Pasht and Jonah Bekhor, as well as the invaluable support of narrator and executive producer Peter Dinklage, How to Become a Cult Leader sticks closely to the Tyrant formula: tongue-in-cheek second-person voiceover instructing viewers how to achieve this particular brand of power, intercut with expert and participant interviews, all accompanied by either directly related archival footage or jokey stock footage, fleshed out by animation courtesy of 6 Point Harness. The “advice” is taken from an imaginary playbook and delivered in terms of tactics like “Get Your Dogma Down,” “Build Your Eden” and “Monopolize All Information.”

It’s a good formula, one that offers the opportunity for actual information to be disseminated and interesting connections to be made beyond wry observations like “A great cult leader isn’t born. He’s made. And how you choose to present yourself to the world can make all the difference,” read by Dinklage with a droll glee.

There’s much more unique value in the “connections between” piece of the equation, given that the producers have mainly selected the most overrepresented of cult leaders as their focus, from Charles Manson to Jim Jones to the duo behind the Heaven’s Gate cult. I found myself most interested in the episodes focused on Shoko Asahara (of the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo) and Jaime Gomez (Buddhafield), having seen feature-length documentaries exploring their stories. There are casual mentions of several cults, some small and some international, that I’d never heard of before, and it’d almost be worth a second season for some deeper cuts.

If you’re doing a 30-minute episode on a figure who has been the subject of a three-hour or six-hour streaming service doc and at least a third of that time is dedicated to jokes, it’s a certainty that the version of the story you’re telling is going to be a superficial one, especially given how many of the talking heads in these segments previously appeared in other documentaries on those respective cults and their leaders. Whether it’s Ivor Davis on Manson or Jeff Guinn on Jones or Benjamin Zeller on the Heaven’s Gate pair, the series reduces a lot of expertise to platitudes.

Of course, if you’re telling a surface-level version of the story, the first place you can cut would be the “consequences” segment. This justifies or explains why How to Become a Cult Leader offers the most sanitized version imaginable of the Manson Family murders, the Peoples Temple suicides/murders in Guyana and the Aum Shinrikyo bombing in the Tokyo subway. It’s quite possible to laugh at an animated sequence featuring Young Charlie Manson in elementary school or to marvel at the precision of Dinklage’s impeccable delivery if you aren’t at the same time being asked to dwell on vicious crimes. Whether the writers were empowered to be more overly comic with this material or whether I found it easier to be amused isn’t clear, but How to Become a Cult Leader surely feels lighter and, maybe in the process, less provocative than Tyrant. Either way, the main instances where the series felt in bad taste were its attempted critiques of the media and public for our collective interest in cults, citing episodes airing on one of several streamers that have made untold amounts of money off that fascination.

There really is clever stuff here and a few interesting linkages, and I can’t speak highly enough of how much value Dinklage adds, but by the end of five episodes, How to Become a Cult Leader was out of satirical ideas. The sixth episode, an attempt to tie the series together, is a total dud. Given the opportunity to reflect on the 21st century as a breeding ground for cults and cult leaders, given the chance to think outside the established cult canon in a way that might be challenging or provocative, the producers chose to wrap with a dull, toothless episode focused on Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church. It’s so half-hearted a conclusion that you can almost sense this being a compromise after the lawyers warned the creators that doing an episode on L. Ron Hubbard would lead to lawsuits and doing an episode on Donald Trump would lead to deafening outrage on Truth Social.

The only thing worse than how lifelessly the show ties up its thesis is the decision to air the show without any sort of call to action. I’m just talking about a link to a website for a cult awareness network or deprogramming organization. You can get away with skipping that vital step if you’re lampooning tyrants, because there’s no hotline you can call if a friend or loved one has fallen under the jurisdiction of a military strongman, but cults are smaller and more personal things.

It’s this sense of scale that maybe lets the producers get away with joking about organizations that violently murdered people or contributed to the deaths of thousands, but which could also make a brief window of advocacy useful or a window of usefulness essential. How to Become a Cult Leader makes dark subject matter occasionally fun, but it might owe its audience slightly more.

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