News of the Weird
Louis Theroux’s new Bravo series takes a
compassionate look at American oddballs. by Sam Adams
When you’ve
followed Avon ladies through the Amazon and checked out the Ku Klux Klan’s plans
to improve their public image, what do you do for an encore?
If you’re
Louis Theroux, former reporter for the short-lived but groundbreaking TV Nation,
you shift gears a bit and come up with Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends, a weekly
series that premieres this Friday at 8 p.m. on Bravo.
Theroux, the son of
novelist Paul Theroux, stood out from TV Nation’s other correspondents in that
he never sacrificed content for the sake of a cheap joke (something TV Nation’s
Michael Moore does all too frequently). There was an unusual compassion and
sophistication in his pieces, something that’s continued in Weird Weekends. The
show doesn’t have TV Nation’s political edge; instead, Theroux concentrates on
stories from what he calls "the cultural fringe," from survivalists holed up in
Idaho to demolition derby drivers.
A former Spy writer, Theroux was
living in New York when he came up with the idea for Weird Weekends, which is
only appropriate since all its subjects are American. Now relocated to London,
which certainly has its own tradition of potty nutters, Theroux explains the
show’s stateside focus thusly: "There’s plenty of eccentrics [in Britain], but
they tend to be more solitary. In America you get people who are able to realize
their dreams and to found entire communities dedicated to living those ideas.
This culture of guilelessness and candor. ‘Yeah, I’m waiting for the UN to
invade - what’s wrong with that?’"
The series’ first episode takes
Theroux into the world of professional wrestling, both the high- and low-budget
kind. The show begins unassumingly enough, with Theroux quizzing Rowdy Roddy
Piper and Goldberg on the ins and out of their trade. But then Theroux takes a
side trip to visit the wrestlers of the AIWF, who bill themselves as the "most
extreme" wrestling organization in the world. Setting up their ring in a school
gymnasium, they hit each other with folding chairs wrapped in barbed wire and
hide razors in their outfits to slash their own foreheads when no one’s looking.
The more blood - or as they call it, "color" - the better the
show.
Theroux then returns to the relatively upscale WCW, this time to
"The Power Plant," their Atlanta school for up-and-coming wrestlers. Having
angered "Sarge," Power Plant’s head trainer, by posing the age-old question of
how much of wrestling is fake, Theroux is subjected to a round of verbal and
physical humiliation that culminates in his being forced to exercise until he
vomits, on camera but out of frame. Clearly, Weird Weekends is not your average
wacky-happy TV newsmag. Though its topics are hardly unfamiliar, Theroux’s
in-depth approach and his willingness to get involved with his subjects make
Weird Weekends episodes more like feature documentaries than their TV cousins.
"I didn’t want it to be like TV," Theroux explains. "I wanted it to be real. If
you’re talking to someone who’s kind of weird or offbeat, in the context of a 6-
to 10-minute segment you can only really make them look ludicrous. One of the
main impulses was to cover similar topics [to TV Nation] but with a little more
sensitivity, which isn’t to say we don’t occasionally make fun of people, but we
were going for other moments in addition to that kind of comedy."
As the
host of Weird Weekends, Theroux finds himself in the position of being "both the
perpetrator and the victim, the scientist and the laboratory animal." Sometimes,
he explains, he’s "aware that I’m doing something that I’m miserable doing, but
I’m also aware that we’re getting great footage." Still, Theroux and his
director Ed Robbins had "a bit of a falling-out" after the wrestling episode was
shot - triggered mostly by Theroux’s feeling somewhat abandoned as Sarge was
making him puke his guts out. "I wish I could say that I was confident that my
director was there waiting in the wings, ready to step in any moment, but I
don’t think he was. I think he was just kind of daydreaming." end.