DooYoo Theroux??!! (Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends)

Member Name: doctordarke2389

Product:	Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends
Date:	28/07/09 (9 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: experience and innocence

Disadvantages: No real risks taken but that's minor

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 making the truly preposterous almost banal.

This success, as much as anything else, relies on Theroux's ability to appear so disarmingly, naively, near dottily inoffensive that his subjects let their guard down and let him into their oftentimes dysfunctional and fractured worlds. One cannot imagine John Humphries, or God forbid Paxman, getting away with it. Not without a black eye, anyway.

In any event, Theroux is always watchable; his programes can turn the most ordinary of events, and crashingly boring subject, interesting by virtue of a searching and insightful enquiry, a seemingly off-hand observation that takes on a whole new meaning with his skilled delivery. He is, in the final analysis, a master of feigned innocence, and the deadpan look so beloved of millions of viewers. Bravo.

Summary: Not a smirk in sight