Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives.
Season 1 Premiere:
Mar 16, 2022
Metascore
Generally Favorable
72
User score
Mixed or Average
4.8
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Metascore
Generally Favorable
72
70% Positive
7 Reviews
7 Reviews
30% Mixed
3 Reviews
3 Reviews
0% Negative
0 Reviews
0 Reviews
Mar 15, 2022
90
Well-paced and efficient, Bad Vegan sucks you into Melngailis's personal drama and keeps you there.
Mar 14, 2022
80
While most true-crime documentaries rely on the heinous, grisly, and gruesome for kicks, Bad Vegan captures a substantive story with a lesson we can all chew on.
User score
Mixed or Average
4.8
27% Positive
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
45% Mixed
5 Ratings
5 Ratings
27% Negative
3 Ratings
3 Ratings
Mar 16, 2022
7
So far I'm just seeing overly privileged people with first world problems getting hooked up with criminals and committing crimes. They took money from investors and their own workers and here we are, they're the stars of their own show. Who gives a **** Only elitist white people care about these idiots. I'm going to soldier on with the hopes of seeing these **** go to jail and cry a lot. God dammit! Take my money Netflix. It was actually very interesting. And though I loathe everything about Sarma, I'd be a big, fat (but not Anthony fat) liar if I didn't admit Sarma's charisma and sex appeal.
Jun 27, 2023
6
An ex investment banker makes a pretentious vegan restaurant, then marries and gets scammed by AJ from the Sopranos while Johnny Fairplay is her lawyer. It's REALY hard to care about what's happening to this absurdly gullible woman. She seemed like a decent person when she befriended that homeless guy or whatever, but honestly - she's probably more culpable than the doc suggests since she's the main one telling the story. But the douchiness and obviousness of her scammer husband goes beyond mere gullibity. I get she's a new age vegan. But come on, believing that your dark-triad abusive husband works for the CIA and will make your dog immortal... I get that he's a predator and she's inherently attracted to dysfunctional and abusive individuals. But the fantastical, ever evolving claims go so beyond the pale of anything. He might as well have told her he's the tooth fairy, but he needs a million dollars top pay back all the toothless kids first, then they'll be wealthy gods. Her total malleability comes across as honestly not sympathetic at all. And that definitely affects the story. I felt badly for her unpaid workers way more than I did for her.
Mar 14, 2022
80
Compelling endeavor. ... What emerges, then, is a concept of Melngailis as a woman who wasn’t just painfully gullible, and therefore susceptible to Strangis’ cult guru-like charms, but a self-interested huckster and dreamer who was constantly angling to keep herself afloat by any means necessary.
Mar 14, 2022
75
There’s a healthy dose of skepticism in “Bad Vegan” that helps it avoid framing this saga as a love story gone wrong, and maybe its most insightful decision is to emphasize how numbing that ratcheting strain becomes on Sarma herself.
Mar 16, 2022
70
We really wish Bad Vegan: Fame. Fraud. Fugitives. was less one-sided, but at least the side we see makes for an entertaining story.
Mar 16, 2022
60
The elusiveness of answers about “why” — and the inability, then, to make “Bad Vegan” about bigger questions about truth or even about the specifics of Melngailis’ world — make the docuseries grow, eventually, frustrating; four hours is a long time to spend running through a specific set of facts with a hard limit as to how far we can explore.
Mar 16, 2022
60
Bad Vegan, however, is a voyeuristically compelling story that’s ultimately more sad than scandalous. It left me feeling queasy and guilty, like I’d eaten an entire Domino's pizza with a side order of chicken wings.





























