# The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping (2024)

> A survivor of a disciplinary school revisits her past to expose the abuse and profit machine behind the troubled teen industry.

Canonical page: https://ember.film/tv/162345

## Facts

- Seasons: 1
- Episodes: 3
- Episode runtime: 63 min
- Status: Ended
- Genres: documentary
- Network: Netflix
- Cast: Katherine Kubler, Janja Lalich
- TMDB rating: 7.4/10
- IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt31183637/

## Ember's analysis

- Pacing: measured
- Intensity: strong
- Complexity: accessible
- Violence: moderate
- Tone: angry, sober, deliberate, harrowing

## Synopsis

The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping (2024) is a American true crime docuseries miniseries released on Netflix. Years after being sent to a disciplinary school as a teenager, a woman still haunted by her experiences returns to the story that shaped her, following her investigation into the troubled teen industry. Across three episodes of roughly sixty-three minutes each, the series builds its case through interviews, archival material and testimony from former students and the people who ran the programs, tracing how private facilities marketed themselves as rescue while operating with little oversight. Its engine is the push to expose a system that profits from parents' fear and children's vulnerability, and each episode peels back another layer of corruption and abuse. The tone is sober, angry and deliberate, with a grounded documentary realism that refuses easy sensationalism. Viewers drawn to the investigative exposés of Leaving Neverland and the cult-focused true crime of Wild Wild Country will find the same appetite for institutional accountability and survivor testimony here. It is a single, self-contained limited run that rewards full attention.

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