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BAFTA Award winning journalist and film maker Louis Theroux introduces us to the world's most interesting, diverse and shocking group of people in a new collection of fascinating films, Louis Theroux: The Odd, The Bad and the Godly, released on DVD by 2entertain on 15th August 2011 as a two-disc set, containing five documentaries.
In the first film, America's Medicated Kids, Louis ventures to the University of Pittsburgh Psychiatric Clinic where he meets some of the parents of the 4,000 children who are on the books. An increasing number of children are being diagnosed with all sorts of psychiatric disorders but are these genuine conditions or parental anxiety? As loving parents come seeking diagnosis, treatment and help for their children, Louis asks whether Americans have started to medicate the personalities of their children as much as their medical conditions.
Four years ago Louis Theroux spent a summer living with the community of the Westboro Baptist Church, famed for their hateful and offensive ministry. Now Louis returns to find a very different community in America's Most Hated Family in Crisis. More like a cult than ever before, they are convinced the world is about to end. But as their behaviour becomes even more extreme, some of the younger members of the Church have fallen away and Louis finds a family heading towards uncertain times.
In Law and Disorder in Lagos, Louis travels to Nigeria's Lagos, one of the fastest growing cities in the world; a city that is growing so rapidly that formal structures of law and order can't keep pace with its population. So Lagos has turned to more controversial forms of control and coercion - the military and the local youths. The Area Boys patrol each district of the city - charging or extorting money from local businesses. KAI (Kick Against Indiscipline) is a paramilitary state government group that routinely storms different areas of the city, bulldozing whole precincts and arresting hundreds should they detect any violation of the state laws. Spending time with both groups, Louis wrestles with life in a world that seems at times utterly lawless and corrupt and at others strangely orderly and formal.
In The Ultra Zionists, Louis spends time with settlers in the occupied territories in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. He wants to understand the lives of people who both put themselves and their families in danger and also seem ready to attract the criticism of the rest of the world in order to plant the flag for a bigger Israel that will encompass new lands. He joins pioneer settlers who claim new hilltops for Jewish occupation and also spends time with those who live cheek by jowl with Palestinians in Hebron and East Jerusalem.
In the final two-part documentary, Louis meets the inmates locked up in Miami's Mega Jail. Holding 6,000 prisoners and processing more than 100,000 people a year, it is a transitory place for those not yet sentenced, those awaiting trial and those awaiting charges. These jails are a new phenomenon in America as the country struggles to process its growing criminal class. From the men on death row awaiting their appeals to those waiting for their first sight of a court room, Louis meets a collection of people thrown together - some innocent, some guilty and none proven yet, either way.
This collection of insightful programmes displays Louis's natural interview technique that allows him closer to his interviewees than any other broadcaster.