The Best of Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends: Volume One (2001)

Louis is a British investigative journalist that didn't much care for the big story of the day. He set out instead to explore American subcultures; he interviewed the people that front them and the people that hide behind them. He didn't take the usual cold, distanced, analytical approach or rely on researchers to do the work for him, he went gung-ho and joined in with activities to better understand his subjects and their unique kind of weird; he got his hands wet, his feet dirty, and his cock out… literally. In some cases he even moved in with them for the duration, and put himself in real physical danger.

The episodes included in Volume One are pretty varied. He enters the porn industry; he visits some right-wing patriots that shunned city life to live in the hills, with guns, and await the NWO invasion; he travels South to meet some shady characters and has a go at Gangsta Rap; he meets some spaced-out UFO enthusiasts, including one guy who claims to channel messages from a higher being while in a trance.

The Weird Weekends series ran for three years. This first collection contains just five episodes (three from S1, one from S3, and a bonus episode from a similar series called 'When Louis Met...' which saw him visit British celebrities in their homes).

What’s sadly missing is the final episode of S1, wherein Louis gathered together a number of the people he'd met throughout the year for Xmas dinner at his own home. He took a fundamentalist Christian to a porn shoot, and gave a guy who lives alone in an underground hut in the hills (Mountain Mike) a chance to spend time at a recording studio and play live for a bar full of people.

5 episodes, approx 55 minutes each.

5 positively peculiar people out of 5