Theroux’s Weird Weekends is some of the best, and most fucked, TV I’ve seen.  I’ve watched all the ones I can find, and would have to say in order of fucked, these are the ones to watch:

1. Thai Brides

2. Westboro Baptist Church

3. Swingers

4. San Quentin
5. Neo Nazis

6. Vegas

7. Porn Industry

8. Legal Nevada Brothels

The first three are there because they strike me as people doing something patently wrong; something hideously unnatural.  I’m sure that Theroux is, like me, not exactly prudish, but I share his sentiment when he encountered the Orgy Room at a swinger party: a nightmarish, writhing cacophony of flesh;  not so much DH Lawrence as HP Lovecraft.  The Thai Brides episode seems to take all the detritus of society, the aggregate oppurtunity cost of our post-Aryan gleaming refridgerator white culture of affluence, grind it up, and bake into a turd-flavoured Big Ben Pie of Despair.  San Quentin is a purgatory;  it’s between worlds, full of not-quite dead, not quite living souls, who are so lost as to make limbo their home, so without reference to anything outside their own inherited guilty conscience that they find it easier to do the time then commit to either heaven or hell.  The Westboro Baptist Church is a concentrated anti-matter nugget of pure crazy that’s just been thrown in a supercollider inside a DeLorian from the future.  Vegas is a place where friends are knife-recepticles and a smile costs several million dollars, where the thrill of the win costs more than the thrill of owning of your own home.  And surprisingly enough the porn industry and the legal brothels don’t really bother me so much.  The only difference between the brothel and San Quentin is in the decor and the subtly of despair.  The porn industry is something I guess I’m so desensitised to;  it’s like your redneck neighbours who kick their dogs;  it’s terrible, but meh.

So yeah, watch Louis Theroux.