There has been a sudden deluge of cult-based television. While Wild Wild Country sheds light on both the appeal and the dangers, others are taking lazy liberties

There are now officially more television programmes than ideas. If you want to watch a show about the manoeuvrings of an American president, you can choose between House of Cards and Designated Survivor. If you want to watch a documentary series about the failings of the justice system, there is Making a Murderer, The Keepers or Last Chance U. Fancy watching no end of identical sub-par Marvel characters drift about aimlessly for slightly too many episodes? Oh boy, Netflix has you more than covered.

And if you want to watch something about a cult, you’re also in luck. Or perhaps luck is not the right word, because a colossal glut of cult-based shows has appeared seemingly from nowhere recently, to the point that the whole idea of cults has been cheapened slightly.

Elements of the cult boom feel tropey, as if created as a shortcut to communicate fear and hysteria

The second series of Netflix’s The Sinner revolves around a utopian commune named Mosswood Grove. The television adaptation of The Purge features a cult whose members wear daft robes. In The Path on Amazon Prime Video, Aaron Paul plays a member of an organisation whose leader apparently received a message of universal truth by visiting Peru and climbing a ladder of burning light. Then there is Paramount’s Waco, a dramatisation of the 1993 Branch Davidan siege; Wild Wild Country, a documentary about Oregon’s Rajneeshpuram community; and last year’s American Horror Story: Cult, which was an American Horror Show series about a cult.

Now, there are all sorts of reasons why America might have a newfound fascination with cults. Maybe it is down to the bizarre intersection of celebrity and organised fanaticism that formed the recent Nxivm scandal. Or, you know, it might just have sudden reason to be interested in stories about charismatic egomaniacs who develop a cult of personality designed to lead people towards their worst instincts. Who knows?

But collectively it adds up to overkill. Like the recent spate of shows about missing kids – and the endless, constant deathmarch of TV shows that use cancer as shorthand for suffering – elements of the cult boom feel tropey, as if they were created as a shortcut to communicate fear and hysteria.

Admittedly, cults are less of a hot-button issue than cancer or missing kids. Botch your execution of those and the hundreds of thousands of people who’ve had first-hand experiences with them will check out immediately, offended that their trauma has been co-opted as a story beat. Markedly fewer people have real-life cult experiences, though, so it is much less of a minefield. So much so that Tina Fey can create a whole sitcom about a “mole woman” who was trapped underground by a monster and the takeaway reaction is how delightfully zany it all is.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Sinner … Bill Pullman as Detective Harry Ambrose, Carrie Coon as Vera Walker Photograph: Peter Kramer/USA Network

As with those other subjects, the shows that feel most respectful are the shows that could not exist without cults. Take the cult out of The Purge and you still have The Purge, albeit a version of The Purge that probably doesn’t owe The Leftovers some sort of royalty cheque. And, even though it is right there in the title, American Horror Story: Cult only used its cult as a new and different way to organise all the spooky clowns that it flings at us each season. These are the shows that feel most superficial in their exploration.

‘Calling it a cult is degrading’: Wild Wild Country’s Ma Anand Sheela on her time as Bhagwan’s​ ​lieutenant Read more

But take the cult out of Wild Wild Country and you are left with nothing. Much more than any of the others, this is the show that does right by its subject matter. Over the course of several hours, we meet the people affected by Rajneeshpuram, both in archive footage and current-day interviews, and learn to see them as people. As a result, our sympathies lurch all over the place. Yes, the cult was bad – there were mass poisonings and assassination plots – but the members’ belief in their cause was so strong and clearsighted that at times you sporadically find yourself rooting for them. When one of the members grows misty-eyed towards the end of the series, you almost want to throw your arms around him and coo: “Go on then, wipe out another town with Salmonella. I can’t stay mad at you.” It is the closest that television has got to making audiences understand the appeal of a cult.

It is just one show, though. And that would have been enough. As for the rest of them, perhaps it’s time to go away and figure out a new trope to play with.

The Sinner: season two is available on Netflix from 9 November