There seems to be a hotspot at the moment for scammers and scamming documentaries, not only have we got this one but we also have the Tinder Swindler and even Inventing Anna. I don’t know where this has come from but it’s already starting to get a bit old.

Bad Vegan follows Sarma, a vegan entrepreneur who owns a business and unfortunately one day falls into the arms of a scammer known as Anthony. Anthony is not all that he seems and in the end this causes a detriment not only to Sarma’s own life but her business as well and the lives of her employees.

We find out the reason Anthony had such a hold on Sarma is because he said he can make her dog immortal. In the Tinder Swindler, if you’re from that sort of background of money and lavish lifestyles then you can kind of believe what he’s going through and buy into it, but when someone tells you that they can literally make your pet immortal you have to start thinking ‘is this a red flag?’ and ‘surely this can’t be real?’. I think a big issue with this series versus other ones we’ve seen previously is that Sarma does not present herself in the best light.

Sarma throughout the whole series plays up to the victim card, and of course she is a victim of what Anthony did to her and the thousands and thousands of dollars her and her family lost, but she did not help herself in the situation. As I said with the Tinder Swindler, if you understand that lavish lifestyle then you could buy into what his world was, however what Anthony was promising Sarma was so outlandish I don’t understand how she couldn’t see from the get go that, that was a huge red flag! And the amount that he affected the people around her and she enabled it by continuing to believe his lies which, as I say again, is literally impossible and should never be believed is shocking.

We get to speak to employees of the vegan restaurant that Sarma owned and we see how their livelihoods and world were affected by everything that was going on, and the fact that in the end Sarma went on the run with Anthony, but she didn’t see it as her being on the run despite having to change her name, hide her tattoos and basically pretend to be another person is shocking and shows that even if she was the victim she still played up to him and that had dire consequences for the people around her that at the start she called family.

I feel because we’ve had an influx of scammer documentaries coming out in recent times that watching this one just didn’t have the same punch that the others do, especially as the victim in this situation was very unlikable and didn’t take into account what she had done to her employees and family. I do wonder if more money scamming documentaries do surface will they get the same reception that the earlier ones did because they are so over done now and, personally for me, I don’t want to watch any more. They all have very similar story lines and the only reason I wanted to watch this one was because it had the vegan element in it which really didn’t come up anywhere, and the fact that he said he could make her dog immortal. Apart from that it was very cookie cutter and basic.

If you enjoy scammer documentaries then of course give this one a go, however if you feel you have already seen it before in other documentaries that I have mentioned then I definitely think you can skip this one. It doesn’t bring anything new to the table and I do hope this is a trend of documentaries that fizzles out quickly, and while it’s good to let people know about the red flags and signs to look out for, in this situation those red flags were so obvious they basically took up the entire screen the whole time and Sarma should’ve never believed in them.

What do you think of the Bad Vegan?

Until next time.

Published by shonaharding

Media graduate with a passion for reviewing film and TV. View all posts by shonaharding