(Un)Well

They refused a narrator, and the skeptics never forgave them

(Un)Well arrived on Netflix on August 12, 2020, as six TV-MA hours about a wellness market The Guardian pegged at $4.2 trillion. Left/Right produced it. Ken Druckerman, Banks Tarver, Anneka Jones, and Erica Sashin are the executive producers. There is no host. Sashin told The Guardian they filmed through 2019 and made "a very conscious decision not to have a host or a narrator, so that we could let the characters speak for themselves." latestnetflix.com's view is that the hope, she said, was that viewers would "make up their own minds."That choice became the whole argument. ,

Anneka Jones, then EVP of development and current production at Left/Right, said wellness was "a multi-billion dollar industry around the world" and that the series wanted "some of the more polarizing trends" and the people "inspired by them." Netflix's menu is specific. Essential oils and the billion-dollar MLMs doTerra and Young Living. Tantric sex, with abuse and cultural appropriation in the same hour. Adults drinking human breast milk. Fasting, including the Silicon Valley version associated with Jack Dorsey. Ayahuasca tourism. Bee-sting therapy, or apitherapy, sold for wrinkles and chronic Lyme. The official trailer went up on Netflix's YouTube on July 23, 2020, asking whether the trends "live up to their promises." , ,

Sashin told The Guardian there was "a lot of conflicting information and misinformation out there, and there's not a lot of hard data and testing done." She did not call the industry a scam. "I don't think it's black and white," she said. The first episode, the paper noted, spends time on doTerra and Young Living, each doing over a billion dollars in annual sales, and references a lawsuit alleging a pyramid scheme against Young Living. The appeal, in her telling, is people "anxious and exhausted from the medical field and the pharmaceutical industries" trying to take control of their own health.

That even-handedness is what the science desks hated. McGill University's Office for Science and Society called the series a Rorschach test that "observes but never judges" and accused it of false balance. Science-Based Medicine called it "poor journalism that neglects science," arguing testimonials were cut to feel as heavy as clinical evidence. The Skeptic in the U.K. walked through an ayahuasca ceremony in which a woman stops breathing and the facilitators hesitate, and said the show still would not pick a side. Those reviews are not rumors. They are the public fight the no-narrator brief invited. ,

Netflix still files the show under Reality TV as much as documentary. Rotten Tomatoes later sat at 86 percent from a thin critic sample of seven reviews, with audience scores in the low 50s on a small sample. There was no confirmed lawsuit from a subject, despite later gossip that someone threatened one. What did exist was a production house known for The Circus and The New York Times Presents, a six-episode grid, and a trailer that sold murk on purpose. Sashin said the team wanted to "sort out some of the fact from the fiction." The critics' complaint is that they sorted nothing, and left the viewer holding both. , ,

The old copy on this title leaned on unverified access fights and unnamed editors. The sourced version is colder. Six episodes, no narrator, a July trailer, an August 12 drop, and a year of wellness believers talking past scientists on camera. If you want the argument that started in 2020, that is still the argument.