‘The Way Down’ Pastor Takes Credit for HBO Max Woes: ‘This Is a Big Win’
26.08.2022 - 03:05
/ variety.com
Kate Aurthur editor The Aug. 6 address before the assembly at Remnant Fellowship — delivered to an in-person gathering in Brentwood, TN, and via webcast to anyone who might want to watch — began typically enough, with congregants watching an old video sermon from Gwen Shamblin Lara, the church’s late founder who died in a plane crash on May 29, 2021. What happened after the video portion ended, though, was unusual. In a portion of the sermon, obtained by Variety, Elizabeth Hannah, Lara’s daughter and a leader at Remnant, called in, as she sometimes does. But instead of her usual teachings for Saturday service, Hannah delivered a homily of schadenfreude aimed directly at HBO Max, the enemy of Remnant and the Shamblin family.
Hannah’s grudge against HBO Max has a specific and pointed history. On Sept. 30 of last year, the streamer dropped the first three episodes of Marina Zenovich’s investigative docuseries “The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin,” which detailed its subject’s rise from being a diet guru with her Weigh Down Workshop (launched in 1986) to her founding of Remnant Fellowship in 1999. After being married to Hannah’s father, David Shamblin, for 40 years, she remarried Joe Lara in 2018, and took his name. Lara was piloting the plane that crashed in which they and five other Remnant leaders, including Hannah’s husband, died; the final two episodes of “The Way Down” were re-edited to incorporate the accident and its aftermath, and were released on April 28 on HBO Max. “The Way Down” featured a number of ex-congregants and diet followers who alleged that Shamblin Lara wielded a destructive power over their lives — controlling their finances, their marriages, how they parented, and their contact
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