I’m beginning to suspect that the feminist movement is operating a covert psyops wing. I like to think that this is the motive force behind the slew of true-crime documentaries that show us, time and again, what bad men do and how they go about it. Perhaps the repeated stories of women – often unhappy with parts of their lives, or otherwise emotionally vulnerable – being love-bombed by apparent male saviours then finding themselves isolated, controlled, coerced, destabilised and battered into submission and sometimes killed that form the predominant subject of this popular modern genre are a way of teaching the young (especially) what is out there. Maybe it’s a way to help them spot the earliest signs of a predator’s approach and arm the innocent against them.

Otherwise, you know, it’s just voyeuristic filler for the ever-gaping schedule maw.

So, then, to the latest possibly instructive tool, possibly a piece of mindless rubbish: Don’t Date Brandon. It’s a strange title – both lazy and misguided, more suggestive of a 90s sitcom (ditzy roommates! Wild situations! One hot guy!) than an account of one man’s cutting of a destructive swathe through his local dating pool, which is what it is.

But that is all of a piece with what is – at least on the basis of the one episode of the three that was made available for review – a lazy and misguided programme. It is based on the podcast Ex-Wives Undercover, which tells survivors’ stories about toxic relationships (gaslighters, catfishers, romance scammers, men leading double lives, those who threaten harm and those who carry it out). It is hosted by the two women around whose experiences with a man called Brandon Johnson the documentary is built.

Amber Rasmussen met him online when she was 35 and became his second wife. He warned her to stay away from his ex-wife Athena Klingerman, with whom he had a four-year-old daughter Sydney, and – after he showed Amber the messages that proved Athena to be the “psycho” he said she was – Amber was happy to do so.

That was until the red flags around her own relationship with Brandon – the woman claiming to be his girlfriend, the mystery job that required so much travel, the cancer diagnosis just as she was planning on moving out of the marital home, inexplicable bills and parking tickets – made her contact Athena. Whereupon they began unpicking the web of lies Brandon had been telling them both. He had of course been lying about his job, which was mostly the cover for an affair he was having with a woman called Avery (Sydney had a bedroom at her house and was told to keep everything secret from her mother and Amber), and his cancer claims (he had pretended to be ill while he was with Athena too), and about Athena’s nature. She had never run up $100,000 on his credit card, as he had told Amber, and the message threads he had shown his second wife had been completely fabricated by him over an entire year.

Most of this information, however, is crammed into the last few minutes of the first episode. The rest of it is spent largely marking time. Amber outlines at length the facts of their relationship, but there is very little emphasis on the psychological effects of Brandon’s actions. Without that, the manipulation looks – to the outsider – so obvious, so blatant that you begin not to sympathise with Brandon’s victim but rather to roll your eyes at a naivety so profound.

I am not saying Amber is in any way to blame, you understand. I’m saying that the programme’s pacing, and its lack of granular detail for so long, means that it does not even start to do justice to the gradual erosion of mind and spirit, the inexorable normalisation of the unacceptable, upon which perpetrators like Brandon depend. I imagine that the next two episodes concentrate on the escalation of Brandon’s behaviour (he was eventually charged with assault and attempted kidnapping with intention to commit rape, and accepted a plea agreement that means he is serving a 10-year sentence in a state prison and is eligible for parole next year) and on Amber and Athena going public with their stories. That in turn leads to the uniting of many other victims of Brandon, a man the women discover was served his first restraining order in 1997 at the age of 19. But those episodes will come on top of a shaky foundation that puts Amber (especially) and Athena in the position of effectively having something to prove about themselves, rather than about the man who hurt them.