HBO Max’s ‘The Way Down’ Wants to Be Your New Cult Docuseries Obsession

At first glance, The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin seems like a true crime saga that’s too wild to be true. In the 1980s, the late Shamblin created the Weigh Down Workshop, a weight loss program that convinced many women that the number on their scales was somehow correlated to their faith in Christianity. That’s an insane premise even if you don’t take into account Shamblin’s jaw-droopingly high hair dos. But while The Way Down will grip you, the reason why feels unintentionally unfocused. Marina Zenovich’s five-episode docuseries seeks to expose the poisonous underbelly of a church-based weight-loss movement that ruined the lives of many women. That harrowing saga just so happens to have a deeply distracting figure as its central subject.

It’s difficult not to be immediately transfixed by the late Shamblin. There’s the superficial reason why. As The Way Down skips from Shamblin’s early years with her weight-loss workshop the Weigh Down to more recent footage, her hair only seems to grow. At one point the docuseries shows footage from Shamblin while she’s giving her testimony to police. It’s nearly impossible to focus on the shocking accusations coming out of her mouth due to her gravity-defying hair. That’s just the tip of the “what is happening” iceberg when it comes to this particular leader.

Time after time, former members of the Weigh Down criticize Shamblin, questioning her morals or implied lack thereof. She’s accused of marrying her second husband, Joe Lara, simply because he was attractive and she had enough money to fuel his country music ambitions. She’s repeatedly accused of using Lara as a sort of sales tactic for her weight-loss program. Also, on the marriage front, Shamblin is repeatedly denounced for her own criticisms of divorce, something she herself did yet rarely acknowledged. That particular hypocritical thorn appears again and again. Then there’s the way Gwen Shamblin died. In March of this year, Shamblin and six leaders from the Church of Christ, including her husband, died when their private jet crashed into Percy Priest Lake in Tenn. Any one of those details is odd, and if this were any other docuseries, they would warrant their own episode or their own chapter. Yet when it comes to this alleged cult leader, these gasp-inducing details are background noise for the true horrors she orchestrated.

After hearing from its victims, it’s difficult to think of the Weigh Down program as anything other than predatory. The Christian diet program taught its followers that food was just another source of potential sin. This idea came from Shamblin, who claimed to be a prophet from God. Based on her teachings, believers who struggled with their weight were actually choosing food and earthly pleasures over their commitment to God. By this logic, the only way to better your relationship with the Lord was to be thin. And wouldn’t you know, Shamblin offered a great weight loss program for all of those Remnant Fellowship Church. members looking to lose a few pounds.

There aren’t many topics that are as triggering for the average American as religion and weight. By connecting them, the Weigh Down Workshop pitted two forms of guilt about unrealistic expectations against each other, creating an ouroboros of self-hatred for these women. But this program’s nefarious trap didn’t stop there. As many interviewed former members attest, Shamblin also emphasized that a woman’s place in the household was to be subservient to her husband. This belief was preached to its absolute extremes. One member was hospitalized while trying to keep up with the demands of this program. When she finally reached out to her husband to pick her up, he refused on the advice of the Remnant Fellowship Church leaders. His reasoning? Because her hospitalization was self-inflicted, he claimed that she wasn’t being respectful to him as a wife.

The Way Down is filled with stories like these. All of them are sickening in how relentlessly exploitative they are. Repeatedly, these women’s faith in God and love of their husbands and families were used against them all in the interest of making a quick buck. It’s a deeply upsetting saga of greed, corruption, and fear. At least that’s the case if you can look past this con’s founder and judge her based on her moral crimes.

The first three episodes of The Way Down are available now, September 30, on HBO Max. The final two episodes are set to premiere in early 2022. 

Where to stream The Way Down