When Jessica Goldberg first sat down to create The Path—the hour-long Hulu drama about family members in a fictional cult—she focused first on the core marital couple, played by Aaron Paul and Michelle Monaghan, whose marriage splinters when one spouse begins to question their faith. Her next step was laying the groundwork for the fictional cult, called the Meyerist Movement.

“I started doing a lot of research,” Goldberg told us by phone earlier this week. “I got a group of writers together and we decided the grocery aisle of our religion’s principles. We really culled some things in all different faiths including Eastern religions and a lot of Judeo-Christian stuff. But it’s a hodgepodge.”

One discovery during their research that Goldberg and her writers ended up mining for the series was the fact that, according to her, “Most cults are first generation. . . . They revolve around a very charismatic leader and when that leader dies, the cult’s over. That was something we went into, trying to figure out how you take a religion from a first generation to a second generation.” The series, through a compound leader played by Hugh Dancy, telegraphs that same predicament as the character struggles to keep the movement alive.

Even though the Meyerist Movement is inspired by a grab bag of religious practices and cult beliefs, viewers (like this one) might tune into the series because of their intrigue about cult mentality. To parse The Path’s accuracies and fictional liberties about cults, we reached out to Steven Hassan—former member of the Unification Church, founder of the Freedom of Mind Resource Center, and author of Combating Cult Mind Control: The #1 Best-Selling Guide to Protection, Rescue, and Recovery from Destructive Cults.

Although Hassan admitted that he was skeptical of the drama upon seeing the trailer (and having seen other television and film projects perpetuate common misconceptions about cults in the past), the Cambridge College alum revealed that, after seeing the first episode of the series, he was impressed by its accuracy and was interested in continuing the series. But first, he answered some of our burning questions.

Vanity Fair: Do cult members really recruit disaster survivors, like the Meyerist members are shown doing with tornado survivors in the opening shot?

Steven Hassan: The closest thing to anything like that is the Twelve Tribes—a pseudo-Christian communal cult that used to recruit kids at rock and metal concerts. They would go to rock shows in a bus and put a Red Cross flag on the outside of it and offer help for people who were having bad [acid] trips. They would recruit people that way, which was really devious and praying on the weak. But they wouldn’t drive them off to their upstate location [like they do on the show].

In my experience, cults that have been around for a while, and are larger, are much more sensitive to how they are perceived and do not do things that might make them look bad like prey on survivors of a national disaster. But [The Path’s writers] may have also read about Scientologists helping after 9/11 and going down to Haiti, which, in my opinion, is more for P.R. and getting wealthy donors to help than for recruiting members.

Do cults typically target survivors of recent trauma as recruits?

There are so many different types of cults that go after different populations, but in general cults really want to recruit smart, talented, intact people who can have trust funds, and who have skills, and who have education, because then they’re going to be more effective for the organization. They don’t want people with serious emotional, psychological drug dependencies because it’s going to take a lot of time and energy away from their activities elsewhere.