HBO Max is continuing to chain together its big series which release each week. We just saw the end of both Euphoria and Hacks, two enormous series for the service, and now we’re on the verge of House of the Dragon season 3 in just over two weeks on June 21. However, HBO Max’s best new show, with a 100% Rotten Tomatoes score, is not any of these.
Rather, these perfect scores have come in for Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult. It is a True Crime documentary that will air in three parts. The first is live now, and the second two episodes will arrive on Monday, June 8 and Monday, June 15, for a total of around three hours.
That’s quite the title, so what exactly is this about? It’s the story of Hoyt Richards, a world-famous model, who joins Eternal Values, a New Age group formed in the ’80s and led by Frederick von Mierers. Richards says he spent 15 years there, and he actually had to physically escape from the cult’s compound in North Carolina. Von Mierers claimed to be an alien prophet and amassed a large following over the years, many of whom were pulled from the modeling world like Hoyt Richards, with von Mierers absorbing millions in “contributions.”
One reason the docuseries was made was that there was relatively little information on it online. And it’s true. The cult and its leader, von Mierers, don’t have so much as a Wikipedia page, and this True Crime drama is the most significant exploration of the cult to date. It took me 20 minutes to even find whether von Mierers was alive or dead. Turns out he died in 1990 of AIDS-related complications, a diagnosis he hid from his followers. The cult itself lived on until about 1999, and Hoyt Richards leaving and taking his money with him had much to do with it.
Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult is currently in sixth place on HBO Max’s Top 10 list, behind a few reality shows and both Euphoria and Hacks. Hacks ended its run with a stunning 98% Rotten Tomatoes score over the course of five seasons, while Euphoria ended on a somewhat sour not, season 3 netting a deeply rotten 44% score from critics and an even worse 38% score from audiences.
If you want something interesting and well-made, it seems like Bring Me the Beauties might be the next thing on your HBO Max’s watchlist ahead of House of the Dragon’s return soon. I’m eager to see how that’s going to review as well.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
