Netflix’s latest docuseries, Gunther’s Millions, delves into the mind-twisting backstory of the richest dog in the world—and, more importantly, the people in charge of maintaining his wealth. The four-part series guides audiences through the answer to the most obvious question: How exactly can a canine amass such a grandiose amount of wealth? And can even a very good dog hold on to that much money without getting involved in a few sordid affairs? However, as the docuseries runs its course, we realize that it’s not the smaller scandals Netflix wants us to gawk at, but, rather more boringly, the existence of the story itself.
Gunther’s Millions begins with the story that the humans of the Gunther Group (the governing body of the Gunther Trust) have been spinning for over a decade. A German countess named Karlotta Liebenstein married a Hungarian refugee who had amassed a fortune through his pharmaceutical company. Liebenstein became close pals with Gabriella Gentili, the president of her own familial pharmaceutical company, Gentili Institute. This story is told to us by Maurizio Mian, Gentili’s only son, who reveals that Countess Liebenstein also had a son, named Gunther, who suffered from depression and died by suicide when he was 26. By the time Countess Liebenstein was nearing the end of her life, with her only son and her husband having passed and no other close relatives, she decided to leave the money to her beloved son’s dog, also named Gunther (the Third). She named her close friend Gentili the caretaker of the dog and manager of the Gunther Trust, who then passed it on to her own son, Maurizio. Mian then became the human face of the Gunther Trust and the sole handler of Gunther’s fortune. [Spoilers for Gunther’s Millions follow.]
Gunther’s Millions takes care to make it clear that everything that follows the first 20 minutes of the series is a project of Mian’s questionable integrity and fanciful imagination. Mian claims that the trust was created with the intention of honoring Liebenstein’s late son by greenlighting explorations of his favorite activities: pop music, boat riding, and, of course, seeking out the happiness he could not find himself. Taking on this mission, and in order to honor Liebenstein and her son, Mian goes on to develop some rather dubious “projects.” There was the album the Gunther Group made, Wild Dog, a wholly unsuccessful and gratingly squawking venture into electronic music. Then, Mian started The Burgundians, a five-person pop group who thought they were cast as multi-hyphenate entertainers but instead were subjects of “scientific experiments,” conducted by people with zero scientific background. These experiments involved encouraging the members to have sex with each other in any manner or orientation, while being allegedly monitored with cameras throughout the house (a Miami mansion that once belonged to Madonna) and then subjected to post-coital questioning. Then, there was Mian’s second attempt at formulating a group, The Magnificent 5, with the express purpose of monitoring the members’ “planned mating” with each other while they simultaneously attempted to grow in other areas of life that Mian’s team believed most attributed to happiness. (Part of the project involved gaudy medallions that would light up when a member increased their standing in any of five categories: physicality, popularity, spectacularity, wealth, and sexuality.) Mian was attempting, through The Magnificent 5 and “the project,” to breed a new superhuman race that would be ideally suited to achieve happiness.
Everything that Maurizio Mian set out to do was in the name of his fight to find a scientifically proven key to happiness in honor of his late friend, Liebenstein’s son, Gunther. But then, Gunther’s Millions pulls back the curtain on the bigger secret at play: It was all a lie. The ethically questionable man maintaining a mass of wealth under the guise of a wealthy line of German Shepherds was lying?! Say it ain’t so!
The Countess and her son Gunther never existed. They were fictions allegedly created by Mian as a way to avoid paying taxes on his family’s own money. The Gentili Institute had developed alendronate, a molecule that proved effective in treating bone diseases like osteoporosis. This huge discovery made the company profitable enough that Mian’s mother sold Gentili Institute to Merck for a sizable fortune. To avoid taxes, Mian claims it was his idea to give the money to a dog via trust—the only way you could bequeath money to a dog. They then created the countess as the owner of the dog, under a foreign name for added protection, but named Gentili the “caretaker” of the dog in order to leave her and her family in control of their fortune. The countess was the cover, but the depressed son, Gunther, was inspired by Mian’s own struggles with mental health.
Gunther’s Millions is fun—at one point, Italy’s more salacious version of Perez Hilton comes into the series claiming that he is God—I will certainly give it that. But, of all the lies Gunther’s Millions tells, the biggest one is that we won’t know from the beginning how it all ends. To traipse through all of the sex-cult allegations, Vatican baby-theft worries, and more sex-cult allegations just to end up where we first started is annoying to say the least. This isn’t to say that Gunther’s Millions is a waste of time, more that it prioritizes an experience it doesn’t deliver on—the crown jewel of true crime media: the ultimate “gotcha!” moment—instead of focusing on the ones it does.
And what it does offer ought to be plenty! I mean, the series spends barely half of an episode detailing the ways in which a random Italian pharmaceutical heir attempted to create a perfect human race that is impervious to woe and misery. It spends even less time on the offhand mention that Mian’s former partner, and mother of his daughter, was afraid the Vatican would take their child because they said the human baby was born unto Gunther the dog. And we don’t get nearly enough of a sense of what the hell all of these people are doing now. There are mentions: a former Burgundian opened up a dog-sitting business; the Italian Perez Hilton is under house arrest (but still manages to have sex from sunup to sundown). Amidst the scandals the Gunther Group has faced, I’m far more interested in the daily life of Gunther’s 27 employees than in the obvious lie being revealed as a lie.
Gunther’s Millions works best when it gets into the culture that this hoarding of wealth through wacky, convoluted methods cultivates—rather than dwelling on the methods themselves. It’s hard to surprise viewers anymore now that the weirdest corners of humanity are regularly made into easily digestible TV episodes for maximum profit. But that doesn’t mean there’s nothing left to entertain us. It’s about time for true crime creators to realize that people themselves are just as interesting as the lies they tell—and so are their dogs.
