Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Deep End’ On Freeform, A Docuseries About Teal Swan And Her Spiritual Influence Over Millions — Good And Bad

The Deep End, directed by Jon Kasbe and produced by Bits Sola, is about the influence of Teal Swan, who considers herself a spiritual leader as well as an motivational speaker. As we get some inner view of her life and how she conducts her business, she’s under attack from people who have accused her of being more of a cult leader, seeking to indoctrinate followers and isolate them from their loved ones.

THE DEEP END: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Teal Swan holds one of her subjects up in a swimming pool; the subject shakes as she processes her emotions.

The Gist: For those who don’t know Teal Swan, they’d be shocked to find out how many people follow her on social media and how many views her YouTube videos get. When she makes live appearances, she sells out 1000-seat theaters, where she analyzes people live on stage, who somehow find it a safe space to open up about their deepest, darkest impulses, including suicidal ideation.

Matthias, Swan’s manager, seeks to get her Facebook reach Tony Robbins levels, on her way to reaching the popularity of Deepak Chopra. We also see Blake, Swan’s head of operations who also happens to be her best friend and former boyfriend; he does everything from color her hair to shoot her videos to appear with her on stage. He’s bringing Juliana, a woman he met in Germany with whom he’s started a relationship, into Swan’s “inner circle,” which makes Swan, who denies she controls the lives of her followers, very uneasy.

Her methods that get people to revisit horrific memories that get them to change their lives has been called into question by people who feel she’s not only unqualified, but feel what she does is almost cult-leader-like. During a retreat, an attendee questions whether if there’s anyone that holds her accountable, and she angrily snaps back that no one does, and she doesn’t need that.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? While The Deep End has a lot of the elements that a cult-focused docuseries like The Vow or Seduced has, it’s not only focused more on the perspective of the person being accused of being a cult leader.

Our Take: Because the first episode of The Deep End is an introduction to Teal Swan, the people around her, and the situation involving Juliana’s integration into her inner circle, the episode is in the style of most fly-on-the-wall documentaries and docuseries, with intimate scenes of what Teal and her people are doing on their day-to-day interspersed with interviews with her and other people in her circle. But soon the interviews fall away and the show has more of a scripted vibe, despite the fact that it’s still a documentary.

In many cases, that would be a mistake; most docuseries need to be grounded in the reality of the side interviews. But here, the more we see of Swan’s intensity interacting with the people in her circle, as well as her followers, the more complete picture we get of her.

Kasbe and Sola have a tough task in trying to tell Swan’s story from her perspective without seeming sympathetic to her. The temptation is to paint her in that sympathetic light because she’s defending herself from her detractors, but they give people unfamiliar with Swan (we’re included in that group) a good picture of how intense she is, how confident in her abilities she is, and how she feels about having the ability to influence people’s lives to the degree she does.

Juliana’s presence is going to challenge Swan as much as the criticisms about her cult-leader-like actions will, and as the conflict between the two of them ramps up, how Swan deals with it will be fascinating to watch.

What also strikes us when we watch Swan do her thing is what strikes us whenever we see a docuseries about a inspirational figure or cult leader: The degree to which people, desperate for support in a world where connections are hard to establish, latch onto someone and follow them without questioning their methods.

The man who questions her during the retreat, for instance, is a rarity; everyone there is listening to Swan like she’s the second coming of Jesus. But even the guy who is questioning her is doing so because he’s been disappointed in other spiritual leaders in the past. So he’s seeking something, but he just have some cynicism because he’s been burned in the past.

Will we see more of that questioning as the docuseries goes along? We hope so. And, as we said, we’re perfectly OK with the format feeling more like a scripted show than what we’re familiar with in today’s docuseries genre. After all, the docuseries that started it all, An American Family, was structured this way, save for some minor narration, so it’s not like this format is something new.

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Swan says that she wants to be more spiritually influential than the pope. “People say that’s not going to happen. Fuck that, it’s not going to happen.”

Sleeper Star: We only get introduced to Juliana in this first episode, but we’re really interested in seeing how she disrupts Swan’s status quo once she’s living at Swan’s compound.

Most Pilot-y Line: Watching people sing “This Little Light Of Mine” during a Swan retreat feels so freaking cliché, it’s silly.

Our Call: STREAM IT. The Deep End tells the story of a spiritual leader who may or may not be a cult leader from that person’s perspective, and in a way that’s a refreshing change of pace for the docuseries genre.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.