98% on Rotten Tomatoes and an Emmy Award winner
The recent releases of Abducted in Plain Sight and Conversations with a Killer: The Ted Bundy Tapes have been notable additions to the Netflix library and given their impressive track record of commissioning and acquiring documentary features, we can now ask the question, what’s your favourite true crime feature on Netflix?
While The Keepers, Making A Murderer, Long Shot, and countless others can all make a strong claim, Wild Wild Country is a documentary series that was unlike anything else.
Some reviews simply categorised it as a ‘sex cult documentary’ but the events that unfolded in a utopian city in the Oregon desert were truly stunning.
In their review of the series, Vulture called said that “it’s a twisty story that goes to very shocking and unexpected places” and they weren’t the only outlet that hailed the series from Maclain and Chapman Way.
In case you haven’t seen it, the documentary series explores a controversy that erupted in the United States in the 1980s, when a controversial cult leader by the name of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh set up a commune in the Oregon desert.
The commune, known as Rajneeshpuram, became the home for Rajneesh’s religious movement and a rather liberal attitude towards sex, but the presence of the commune and its inhabitants did not go down well with locals in the nearby town of Antelope.
The conflict between the commune’s residents and locals soon turned into a national scandal, resulting in the largest bioterrorism attack in US history (a number of local salad bars were contaminated with salmonella), the discovery of the largest wiretapping operation in the United States and conspiracy to assassinate a US attorney.
Wild Wild Country won a Primetime Emmy for Outstanding Documentary or Nonfiction Series and a film adaptation is now in development.
During a recent interview with Ellen, Baywatch star Priyanka Chopra revealed that she’s developing a feature-length version of the documentary series.
“We’re developing it as the character of Sheela, who was this guru who originated from India, [Osho’s] right-hand woman. And she was just devious and created a whole cult in America, brought people here. [The doc] was amazing, and I’m developing that next for me to star in and produce, which I think would be really cool,” said Chopra.
If you loved the documentary, you’ll definitely be watching this.
Clip via TheEllenShow
