HBO’s The Vow has been comically terrible. It took a really interesting subject—the existence of the multi-level marketing scheme-turned-sex-cult NXIVM—and clearly had no idea how to tell the story. There’s a loose thread about defectors trying to bring down NXIVM, but at no point have directors Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer found a larger theme or thoughtful subtext to build upon. Instead, they seemed to have played into their subject’s worst, most narcissistic tendencies to fashion themselves as rebellious heroes, thus repeating the self-actualization garbage that brought them into NXIVM …