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Don’t Date Brandon is a three-part docuseries, directed by Grace Chapman and “inspired” by the podcast Ex-Wives Undercover, that details how Athena Klingerman and Amber Rassmussen, two of Brandon Johnson’s ex-wives, teamed up to not only look into all the lies that Brandon told them during their respective marriages to him, but how they created a podcast that helped warn others who were dating Brandon to stay away from him.
DON’T DATE BRANDON: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
Opening Shot: A home video of Brandon Johnson, and a voice saying, “Brandon was the whole package.”
The Gist: We first hear from Amber, who met Brandon on Tinder in 2013, and he popped the question to her within six weeks of meeting in person. At first, everything was great. But just as Amber decided to quit her job and move from Portland, Oregon to Seattle to live with Brandon, one of her friends notices his picture on a Match profile — a picture where he’s cropped Amber out. He explains it away as a dumb mistake, so that big, glaring red flag doesn’t dissuade her from starting a life with him.
But it also seems like he’s preoccupied with his “crazy ex-wife” Athena, who seems determined to get him back and have more children with him (they have a daughter together and Athena had a daughter from a previous relationship). There are restraining orders and, eventually, Brandon and Amber moving back to Portland. Communication with Athena was restricted to being through a court-ordered parenting app, where it seems that Athena is always backing out of her time with her and Bandon’s daughter. Oh, and while all of this is going on, Brandon is supposedly undergoing treatments for leukemia.
Amber eventually finds out that, when Brandon makes the 3.5-hour trips to Seattle with his daughter for handoffs with Athena, or the drive to get cancer treatments, he’s seeing an old girlfriend. He claims that she’s stalking him, and shows her getting arrested for violating an order of protection. Amber, who was convinced to this point that Athena was “crazy”, reaches out to her and talks to her about some of the communications they’ve had via the parenting app. The surprise comes when Athena has not idea what in the hell Amber is talking about.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Don’t Date Brandon is definitely in the genre of docuseries that includes shows like Love Fraud.
Our Take: Chapman and her crew do a good job of pumping the brakes and not making Don’t Date Brandon crazy from the outset. By starting with Amber and not Athena, we see what seems like a normal, albeit quick-forming, relationship play out before all of the secrets and lies start to be unearthed. But once they are, it starts to be a breakneck ride, and the viewer has no idea where it’s going.
By the time we hear about Brandon and Athena’s tumultuous marriage, it’s pretty obvious that Brandon is a controlling, manipulative person that has no compunction with brainwashing his three-year-old daughter to be suspicious of her own mother. He’s also good at creating fake text chains and chats, and can even fake medical records with a degree of believability (he told Athena he had lung cancer at the same time he said to Amber he had leukemia).
At the end of the episode, he’s positioned in the same way as a shapeshifting alien on a sci fi show would be; how can you defeat him when you don’t even know what kind of a person he really is? He is also good at poisoning the reputations of his exes via social media and other manupulations.
What will be interesting is how Amber and Athena team up and do the only thing they know to combat Brandon’s lies, which is to warn as many people as possible about him. As an episode-ending graphic explains, Brandon denies all of this, but he didn’t want to talk on camera, either. So do you believe him or the dozens of women who are all saying similar things about him?
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: We see a video of Amber unlocking her front door, where she sees a hooded Brandon sitting in her living room. She explains that she naively thought he wouldn’t do to her the things he did to his other exes… “until he did.”
Sleeper Star: Athena’s older daughter Lexus, who is interviewed for the docuseries, has an interesting perspective on just how manipulative Brandon was, relating a story where he made like he was going to hang himself off her swim set after the first time Athena kicked him out.
Most Pilot-y Line: We wish Chapman had more time for some self-reflection by Amber and Athena about how they missed the red flags that Brandon was putting up, like when he proposed to Amber after six weeks.
Our Call: STREAM IT. Don’t Date Brandon is a short but intense story of how a man was able to fool and manipulate multiple women, and how two of his exes fought back the best way they knew how. It definitely gains momentum as it goes along, but by the end of the first episode, it hooks viewers in just to see what in the hell Brandon is going to do next.
How To Watch Don’t Date Brandon
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Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.