Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends

Louis Theroux travels to Fresno, California to uncover the impact of the highly addictive drug methamphetamine, more commonly known as Crystal Meth. Fresno is a city riddled with poverty, unemployment, crime and homelessness. If this is not enough the city is coined the "methamphetamine capital" of the USA. The consequences of the drug are detrimental to the entire community. Virtually unknown in the United Kingdom, Crystal Meth has taken to the states like wildfire. Over the past few years Crystal Meth has become the primary drug of choice in Fresno because it can be obtained at a low cost, made easily and is highly addictive. When talking to the police, ...  Read the complete review

Louis Theroux is a documentary maker with a difference. His work focuses on people and activities that most of us would consider at best, strange, and at worst disturbing. He has made documentaries on subjects ranging from Jimmy Saville, to white supremacists, and assorted topics in between. The key to his success in getting great information and material on these subjects is his ability to try to understand the people he is documenting. He may have found the white supremacist's views abhorrent, but he managed to be challenging enough to get interesting material, without antagonising them so much that they would not cooperate with him. A good ...  Read the complete review

Theroux always comes across as a likeable, affable kind of chap with a talent for getting into some of the wackiest corners of human existence, and presenting them with a straight face. It doesn't matter which side of the Atlantic or which continent he works on, the results are usually very similar. He harbours a genuine talent for making the absurd and shocking almost theatrically ordinary; in so doing, his series of encounters with the Hamiltons, Nevada hookers, vertically-challenged serial womanisers in Bangkok, Jimmy Saville for crying out loud, and many others who skirt along the frayed edges of the lunatic fringe are genuine bona fide masterpieces of ...  Read the complete review

Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends contains the bulk of Louis Theroux's documentaries and in my opinion the best ones are all in this series. Firstly, for those who don't know who Louis Theroux is, he is a very well educated (Oxford university) interviewer who manages to get a lot out of interviewees by using a naive persona that lulls them into a seriously false sense of security. What makes Louis Theroux documentaries special is that he is very good at getting a lot out of those he questions, whilst remaining somebody who both the interviewee and viewers both still like as a person. This makes his documentaries very watchable. What makes Weird ...  Read the complete review

There are around 300,000 Jewish people of working age in the UK, and very hard working and intelligent people too, but it feels like 278,000 of them are employed in the media, such is the prevalence and ease of guys like the likeable and disarming Louis Theroux to get on our TV screens, always room for one more Theroux in the entertainment industry it seems. Travel writer father Paul Theroux no doubt made some calls and hey presto, gangly Oxbridge son Louis is soon working on Michael Moore's excellent show, 'TV Nation', over in Manhattan. Louis older brother Marcel is a TV presenter and his cousin is Justin Theroux the American actor. I'm not saying Louis is a bad TV ...  Read the complete review