Apple Cider Vinegar has a problem. No, not the liquid—rather, Netflix’s new true-crime miniseries. It follows Belle Gibson, an Australian scammer who, in the early-to-mid-2010s, falsely claimed to have cancer, and to be thriving in spite of it, thanks to natural remedies instead of conventional medical treatment. At a time when blogs were ultra trendy and social media platforms like Instagram were just gaining popularity, Gibson persuaded her online followers to believe in the pseudoscience she spouted as she positioned herself as a wellness guru.
Across six episodes, the series, which stars the perennially great Kaitlyn Dever as Gibson, takes turns focusing on different players in the story as it spins, then untangles, Gibson’s web of lies. It’s good—really good, even. The performances are strong, and the show takes a stylized approach to form, with nonlinear storytelling and fourth-wall breaks. Showrunner Samantha Strauss is clearly aware that true-crime products are maligned for their role in the public’s desensitization to the horrors and tragedies of the world, in favor of homogenized melodramatic narratives. But just because Apple Cider Vinegar demonstrates a knowledge of the genre’s pitfalls doesn’t mean it successfully sets itself apart from the worst of its ilk. By the series’ end, it has become the very thing it mocks.
Each episode opens with one of the characters delivering the same disclaimer to the camera: “This is a true story based on a lie. Some names have been changed to protect the innocent. Belle Gibson has not been paid for the re-creation of her story.” In a clever trick, this fourth-wall-breaking spiel undergoes a transformation as the series progresses, with the phrase true story lessening in conviction. The first episode shows Dever, as Belle, saying the word true. At the series’ halfway point, Belle’s onetime crisis PR manager Hek (Phoenix Raei) deems the tall tale true-ish. By the end, Belle’s mother Natalie (Essie Davis) tells us directly: “This is not a true story. Full disclaimer.” The tactic blurs the lines between what we viewers know and what we don’t. The narrative device contextualizes each character’s assessment of Belle’s lies at that point in the story; Belle, of course, believes herself, her mother is depicted as having always been under the impression that her daughter is full of BS, and Hek knows that Belle is exaggerating but can’t ascertain to what extent she is stretching the truth. Where the confusion arises, though, is in how the phrasing relates to the episode’s depiction of actual events. Does Episode 1, for instance, hew somewhat close to the truth, while the final episode relays total fiction? When Justin (Mark Coles Smith), the journalist working on the exposé that will eventually bring Belle down, uses the phrase mostly true during his delivery of the disclaimer, is he talking about his pending exposé of Belle’s lies or about Belle herself?
It’s a seemingly deliberate ambiguity that encompasses the show’s slick approach to the true-crime question as a whole. Even while acknowledging the pitfalls and dangers of the genre with a cheeky wink and a nod, as if proving that the series is above all that, Apple Cider Vinegar has the trappings of the genre. In Episode 3, Hek disrupts the usual opening monologue of the “true-ish” story to give us a screed of his own: “Do you care? Should you?” It’s unclear whether he means caring about the story or caring about the real lives behind it. “Stories were meant to connect us, but our compulsion to narrativize and dramatize heroes’ journeys, goodies, baddies—we’ve become incapable of objective thought,” Hek finishes. This self-righteous speech chastises us as consumers of true-crime narratives, but the series is guilty of the same. It wants to have the smarter take, one befitting a true-crime scammer story in 2025, when we’re all supposed to know better. But this show exists because someone had the compulsion to “narrativize” this particular “baddie”—so why is that now our issue to feel bad about?
That scolding streak is the biggest detractor from what is otherwise a highly watchable show, complete with great performances, convincing accents (seriously, Dever might be the first Hollywood starlet to pull off an Aussie twang), and a spot-on re-creation of the energy of the aughts, when our nascent understanding of the internet and social media allowed Gibson’s influence (and scams) to reach new heights. But the show ultimately fails to come across as smarter than your other true-crime slop. At this point, we know that every dramatized story must have good guys and bad, with not much room for those in between. It’s common knowledge, now that the true-crime boom has also inspired fervent backlash, that the word inspired in “Inspired by a true story”—the familiar phrase that prefaces the majority of Hollywood biopics, including this series—does some heavy lifting when it comes to a show’s ability to represent facts. At this point, there’s not much about the genre’s massive popularity, and what its success has wrought, that we don’t know or understand.
But even in the end, when Apple Cider Vinegar does the classic thing of showing title cards that tell the viewer how the rest of the story actually unfolded in real life—“In 2017, the Federal Court of Australia found Gibson guilty of misleading and”—it abruptly cuts off, and we hear Dever’s Belle say, “You know what? You can Google it.” It’s an illustrative moment; Apple Cider Vinegar is smart enough to recognize the problems with the genre, but instead of trying to fix them or even address its own culpability in this ecosystem, it instead gets irritatingly cute about it all. You can’t have it both ways, ACV! Don’t admonish us for not being guilty about liking your otherwise great show if you’re the one that’s spent heaps of money to bring it to my attention.
