Big Vape: The Rise And Fall Of Juul is a four-part docuseries, directed by R.J. Cutler, that goes over the development and marketing of the Juul e-cigarette, how it took off, and then how the company got into hot water and lost market share when it got backlash for teens using the product. The series is based on the 2021 book Big Vape: The Incendiary Rise Of Juul by Jamie Ducharme, who is interviewed for the series, along with experts, investors in Juul, as well as former employees, some who have agreed to be interviewed on camera and some who have decided to remain anonymous. The company’s co-founders, Adam Bowen and James Monsees, did not agree to sit for interviews, but we see interviews with them via archival footage.
Opening Shot: We hear an anonymous source’s voice saying, “I’m not sure this story could be told on record, but I’m gonna tell you anyway.”
The Gist: The first episode discusses the idea behind Juul, which actually started life as a company called Ploom. Bowen and Monsees met as grad students at Stanford University, and as smokers, they wanted to find a way to keep the ritual of smoking and the nicotine hit delivered by cigarettes without the harmful effects that contribute to smokers getting lung cancer and other illnesses. The goal was to help people quit smoking, even though the idea of creating a nicotine delivery system made it a bit iffy as graduate project for the university’s brass.
But their design, which heated the tobacco instead of setting it on fire, was well received, and they went to market with the first Ploom e-cig, at a time when other e-cigs were coming on the market, but in a way that marketed them as a smoking substitute instead of a way to quit. The first model had issues, from its dependence on butane to the fact that it didn’t give smokers the nicotine hit that cigarettes could give.
Their next product, the Pax, was designed to be used with lose leaf tobacco but ended up becoming popular among weed smokers, and it was marketed towards that. Then the Juul was invented, which became a much more elegant solution, and sales took off. But who was actually using the device?
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Big Vape is in a similar category to other Silicon Valley-themed documentaries, like The Inventor.
Our Take: Perhaps it’s because Bowen and Monsees refused to be interviewed, or it could just be their personalities, but Cutler doesn’t go out of his way to portray the founders of Juul as your typical Silicon Valley techbros. Sure, they still adhere to the “move fast and break things” approach their fellow ’00s-era tech entrepreneurs followed, but it did seem like they had a sincere desire to help people stop smoking. In fact, they took pains to avoid getting investment from any of the Big Tobacco companies during the first phases of Ploom/Juul’s existence, and they used the companies’ own research into developing a heated tobacco nicotine delivery system as the basis for their invention.
So, what Cutler is trying to communicate is that the founders’ good intentions weren’t bullshit, even if their ultimate goal was to make themselves and their investors as much money as possible. Of course, as forward-looking as this first episode seems, the story of Juul is much more about how the product was marketed and the health issues around vaping that Bowen and Monsees didn’t seem to count on as they were developing the product.
What Cutler makes sure to emphasize in the first episode is that, despite the fact that Juul and other e-cigs eliminate a lot of what regular cigarettes put into people’s lungs, it’s still a delivery system for a highly-addictive drug. He doesn’t belabor the point, but he uses that point to foreshadow the difficulties the company faces later on, when their marketing targets a young demographic that ends up alarming both parents and the FDA.
But what we also found interesting about the first episode is that Bowen and Monsees actually manage to develop a revolutionary product, because many of the vape pens and e-cigs that were out when the Juul came to market didn’t have nearly as elegant and convenient a design as the Juul did. It’s not vaporware, and it’s not filling a niche that didn’t need to be filled. Their mistakes weren’t in the design or even the need for such a product; Juul’s failure was both a failure of marketing and a failure of clinical research. It’ll be interesting to see how Cutler approaches this in the series’ other three episodes.
Sex and Skin: None.
Parting Shot: Scenes from the second episode, including protestors screaming, “JUUL’s getting richer while kids are getting sicker!”
Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to the animators of the reenactments. The animations look a heck of a lot better than the live-action reenactments we usually see.
Most Pilot-y Line: We wish less former employees did their interviews behind the cloak of anonymity. Maybe the things they say will be more incendiary in later episodes, but what bridges are they really burning by saying that marketing nicotine products to young people was a bad idea?
Our Call: STREAM IT. Big Vape: The Rise And Fall Of Juul is an informative and interesting docuseries about a product that was truly revolutionary that failed due to marketing mistakes and lack of clinical testing.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.