I’m a sucker for a show about cults, and I would strongly recommend that everybody watches Wild Wild Country and Jonestown: Terror in the Jungle.

Kirsten Dunst’s new series, On Becoming a God In Central Florida, is a little different, though.

The series takes a dark, comedic approach to the thorny issue of cults and pyramid schemes, and Dunst is receiving rave reviews for her starring role.

Variety goes as far as to say she “breathes incandescent life into Robert Funke and Matt Lusky’s tragicomedy”:

As Orlando, Fla. single mom Krystal Stubbs, Dunst…finds out just how deep her husband Travis (a disarmingly goofy Alexander Skarsgård) got into a cultish pyramid scheme before suddenly exiting her life, she has to navigate debt and despair without sinking underneath. She’s stubborn, smart and unafraid to piss people off, and yet quickly discovers that disentangling from FAM (the show’s barely veiled facsimile of Amway) is far more difficult than she ever could’ve imagined.

Amway, Herbalife, and so on and so forth – you know the drill.

Let’s see Kirsten in action:

Yup, make a mental note to watch this one at some point.

The reviews really do heap praise on Dunst, but there are plenty of characters to scrutinise:

Dunst’s performance is so magnetic that the show could’ve focused on her alone, but it wouldn’t have been half as effective. While Krystal is its undeniable hellion heroine, the series is as much about egocentric scam artists and the widespread devastation they can wreak as it is about Krystal’s struggle to overcome it all.

Get out while you still can, girl.

[source:variety]