Freedom, control, and the children left behind.
The Commune follows the Centrepoint story through people who were there, old places, and the long shadow of Burt Potter. It is less a mystery than a careful account of how freedom, obedience, sex, drugs, and family life became dangerously entangled.
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The Commune is a New Zealand documentary series about Centrepoint, the free-love commune whose promise of openness curdled into control, abuse, denial, and lasting damage. It does not treat the story as a simple hunt for one shocking revelation. The harder question is how so many people lived with what was happening, explained it away, or only later understood what they had been part of. The series is built from interviews, old memories, site visits, and the steady accumulation of detail. A birthday table matters. So does a bulk kitchen, an open shower, a song played from the lookout, and a meeting that goes on forever because consensus has become its own ritual. Those details make Centrepoint feel plausible before they make it horrifying. The show is especially strong on that tension. People remember adventure, intimacy, therapy culture, sex, drugs, and the thrill of stepping outside ordinary social rules. Then the narrative turns, often quietly, toward children being treated as community children, toward obedience to Burt Potter, and toward adults who now ask what they knew or should have known. Potter remains central throughout: leader, letter-writer, prisoner, and the person whose influence kept reaching back into the commune. The series also widens the frame to the 1970s and early 1980s, when sexual liberation, counterculture, and human-potential language could make dangerous ideas sound enlightened. Rosemary McLeod helps place those fears in context. Other voices sit with their own compromised memories, including Peter's account of a moment that exposes how badly the commune's social world had warped ordinary judgment. The tone is grave but not theatrical. It lets people speak, then steps in with enough structure to keep the moral line visible. There is no neat cleansing at the end. What remains is a careful, human account of attraction and harm sharing the same ground.
Made for: For listeners drawn to serious narrative true crime, cult histories, and accounts of charismatic communities. It suits people who prefer moral complexity over cliffhangers.
What sets it apart: The series spends as much time on Centrepoint's ordinary appeal as on its crimes, which makes the harm harder to dismiss as something that only happened elsewhere. It is investigative without becoming procedural, and intimate without losing judgment.
A 12-part documentary podcast about the notorious free-love commune, Centrepoint. There are crimes. But this isn’t a whodunnit. It’s a whydunnit.
Based on 5 episodes we listened to · September 2026
The Commune makes Centrepoint's internal logic legible without losing sight of the former residents and children who lived with its consequences.
The Commune follows life inside Centrepoint through a serialized investigation shaped by former residents' testimony, the host's narration, recorded speeches, letters, and court-era accounts.
Centrepoint's birthday cake and blind obedience share a table, and Adam Dudding makes you face both.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A steady account of Centrepoint that keeps the abuse in focus, follows Peter's uncertainty, and lands on one disturbing memory from the commune's freer years.
The story opens with a guided walk through the former Centrepoint Commune, where open showers, longhouses, and the laundry and toilet blocks give the place a plain physical outline.
A Centrepoint story that keeps relief, memory, and control in the same room.
The Commune opens on the aftermath of Burt Potter's death, and the mood is less neat mourning than a hard-to-hide relief. It stays with Centrepoint just long enough to ask why people went there at all, and a single urgent interview with a seriously ill former resident pulls the…
Warm communal detail leads into a quiet, uneasy question about what independence can leave behind.
The episode stays close to Centrepoint life: bulk lasagne, birthday tables, movie nights, and music drifting over the grounds. Those ordinary details give the place warmth, and that is part of what makes the central question stick.
A prison chapter that shows how authority can keep going after the leader is gone.
With Bert Potter in prison, the episode settles into the harder question in a cult story: what keeps working after the leader is locked up and still sending letters.
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The Commune’s Episode 10, “The Writing on the Wall,” examines Nate’s account of being sexually exploited by older women at Centrepoint when he was 14 or 15.
Episode 6 of The Commune follows the children who grew up at Centrepoint in New Zealand during the mid-1980s, focusing on Renee Meiklejohn, who arrived aged nine with her mother and siblings.
Episode one of The Commune is the origin story of Centrepoint, a New Zealand commune that operated from 1978 until the early 2000s and eventually resulted in criminal convictions, millions of dollars lost, and lasting trauma for many members.
Barbara's guided tour anchors the episode.
Episode 8 of The Commune covers the 1989 drug raid on Centrepoint and the subsequent trial of leader Burt Potter, who was convicted of possessing LSD and ecstasy for supply and sentenced to three and a half years.