Netflix's Troubled Teen Docuseries The Program Understands Its Limitations

Director Katherine Kubler has one goal in mind with Netflix's The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping: revenge.

Over the course of three episodes, Kubler and her friends recall the abuse they suffered at the Academy at Ivy Ridge, a facility for "troubled teens" in upstate New York. The program at Ivy Ridge was designed to break students down emotionally and physically, and it worked. Many of the docuseries's subjects struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder and substance abuse, while dozens of their friends have died by suicide or overdosed in the years since leaving the facility.

As the filmmaker explains, The Program — the latest in a series of documentaries about amateur investigators who set out to expose the truth — is a direct response to the decades of suffering these survivors have endured. "I've always said this was like Count of Monte Cristo because I had this false imprisonment where I planned my big revenge," Kubler says as she stands in the library of the crumbling building. "I was like, 'When I get out of here, I'm gonna make a documentary about these places, and I'll get back at every one of you!'"

Kubler, who spent 15 months at Ivy Ridge when she was 16 years old, employs two different strategies to achieve that aim. The first is deeply personal, as the group works to compile enough information to prove the "school" was actually a for-profit facility that humiliated, brainwashed, and forever scarred them. The second is more global in scope: In the final episode, "Follow the Money," Kubler digs into the World Wide Association of Specialty Programs and Schools (WWASP), the umbrella organization that ran Ivy Ridge and similar facilities around the world, in hopes of exposing the corruption at the heart of the troubled teen industry.

The Program is much better at the former, though administrators at Ivy Ridge have made it easy for the group to build a case against them. When the facility closed in 2009, WWASP abandoned the campus and its contents; years later, thousands of sensitive files remain available for anyone's perusal, including copies of Social Security cards, letters to parents, "intervention" and "consequence" reports detailing alleged bad behavior, and harrowing video footage of staff assaulting students.

Throughout the docuseries, Kubler and her friends use this trove of evidence to confront their abusers, almost all of whom admit to either mistreating children themselves, or closing their eyes to it. Kubler's inexperience comes through in some of these interviews. She declines to press former shift supervisor Florence "Miss Siss" DeDekker on her detailed account of how she forcibly "put [students] to the ground," and when someone asks them to stop filming in the diner, bringing the conversation to an abrupt end — "Apparently, one of the waitresses didn't want us talking about Ivy Ridge. I wonder why that could be?" she says via narration — she fails to follow up.

Kubler becomes more comfortable asking hard-hitting questions as the investigation progresses, but it's her friends who really deliver the righteous indignation that powers the doc. In one of the show's most affecting moments, Alexa Brand, who alleges she was groomed and raped by a female employee during her 22 months at Ivy Ridge (Kubler is "not allowed to name" the staffer because "no reports were ever filed"), finds the family representative who lied about her initial drug test and convinced her parents she was a "crack whore," when in reality, she had never used drugs in her life. When the woman calls Brand and attempts to justify her behavior, Brand shuts her down by turning Ivy Ridge's lingo back around on her. "You are not working your program if you're not taking accountability, and you're playing the victim," she says. "And it's not about you as an individual. It's about you as part of an institution... You are one of many people who contributed to a lifetime of trauma."

The subjects also speak openly about how the program "completely splintered" their families. While some parents have come to terms with their role in their children's trauma and are actively working to make amends, both Kubler and Brand struggle to get through to theirs. The investigation, and the docuseries that emerges from it, takes on greater meaning for each of them, as Brand begs the former family representative to tell her parents "that the entire program was a lie," and Kubler, who cut off communication with her father during the course of filming, searches for something that will impress on him "the hopelessness and abandonment that [she] felt there," in addition to the "psychological torture" she endured.

Kubler is less successful when she leaves behind the intimate stories of Ivy Ridge students and turns her attention to WWASP as a whole. Episode 3 lays out a complex web of deceit that links founder Robert Lichfield, who made millions from facilities like Ivy Ridge, to high-ranking government officials in Utah and Congress, including Sen. Mitt Romney. Though Nathan Lichfield, the son of Robert's brother Narvin, who oversaw WWASP's marketing arm, sheds light on his father and uncle's unfettered greed, Kubler doesn't unearth any new information about the organization's shady business practices or the epidemic of abuse at their facilities. Instead, the episode relies on information gleaned from exposés on programs for troubled teens, local investigations, lawsuits filed by parents and former students, and a 2008 Congressional inquiry into these programs to emphasize the horrific ways kids have been treated and raise questions about why people at the top have evaded responsibility for so long.

But if The Program fizzles out in its final episode, it's because Kubler, unlike so many other amateur detectives on streaming, is realistic about her ability to go toe-to-toe with a powerful, billion-dollar industry and come out on top. However noble her quest for revenge may be, Kubler acknowledges that her options are limited; beyond releasing the docuseries, her best shot at justice is following Narvin Lichfield to karaoke and singing "One Way or Another" at him. "If the smallest thing that can come out of this is just to expose it publicly, they're getting off easy — very, very, very easy," she says. "I'm not a law enforcement agency. I'm just a kid trying to expose the truth."

In this case, Kubler has done more than enough. Not every documentary must offer a solution, especially when the problem is something as pernicious and far-reaching as state-funded child abuse. By opening up about her personal experience and giving other survivors the space to do the same, Kubler clears a path for someone with more influence — perhaps Utah State Sen. Mike McKell, who appears in the final act — to step in to shut down the troubled teen industry, once and for all.

The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping is streaming on Netflix.

Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg.