His work includes studies of unusual and taboo subcultures, crime and the justice system, and celebrities. The New Yorker described Theroux's work as "a piercingly humane, slyly funny guide through the funkier passages of American culture". His older brother, Marcel , is a writer and television presenter.
Theroux moved with his family to England when he was one year old, and was raised in the Catford area of south London. Theroux's first employment as a journalist was in the United States with Metro Silicon Valley , [ 18 ] [ 19 ] an alternative free weekly newspaper in San Jose, California. He also worked as a correspondent on Michael Moore 's TV Nation series, [ 9 ] for which he provided segments on offbeat cultural subjects, including selling Avon to women in the Amazon Rainforest , the Jerusalem syndrome , and attempts by the Ku Klux Klan to rebrand itself as a civil rights group for white people.
In Weird Weekends — , Theroux followed marginal mostly American subcultures such as survivalists , black nationalists , white supremacists , and porn stars , often by living among or close to the people who were involved in them.
His documentary method subtly exposes the contradictions or farcical elements of his subjects' seriously held beliefs. He described the aim of Weird Weekends as:. Setting out to discover the genuinely odd in the most ordinary setting. To me, it's almost a privilege to be welcomed into these communities and to shine a light on them and, maybe, through my enthusiasm, to get people to reveal more of themselves than they may have intended.
The show is laughing at me, adrift in their world, as much as at them. I don't have to play up that stuff. I'm not a matinee idol disguised as a nerd. In the series When Louis Met His episode about British entertainer Jimmy Savile , entitled When Louis Met Jimmy , [ 22 ] was voted one of the top documentaries of all time in a survey by Britain's Channel 4. In an interview in , Theroux expressed his intention to produce a follow-up documentary about Savile for the BBC to explore how the late entertainer had continued his abuse for so long, to meet people he knew closely, and examine his own reflections on his inability to dig more deeply into the first case.
