Every self-respecting Northwesterner is going to want to take a look at Wild Wild Country. The six-part Netflix documentary series, which premieres this Friday, March 16, examines one of the weirdest episodes in the area’s history, when Indian religious leader Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh opened a commune in Central Oregon in the early 1980s. It did not end well.
For longtime residents, it’s a familiar and painful story, one in which the Rajneeshees took over the government of the nearby town of Antelope and attempted to gain control of Wasco County. In 2012, OPB’s Oregon Experience made a masterful documentary, Rajneeshpuram, which expertly and concisely tells the entire hair-raising tale–which includes voter fraud, a hotel bombing, illegal immigration, an enormous cache of automatic weapons, and a bioterrorist attack of salmonella poisoning in the Dalles. The OPB film is mandatory viewing for anyone living in the Northwest or with an interest in fringe religious movements.