The BEST episodes directed by Jamie Pickup
#1 - Extreme Love: Autism
Louis Theroux - Season 1 - Episode 20
Louis visits one of the best schools in America for autism. He meets the students and their families to get a glimpse of what life is like for them and to experience the pleasures and the strains of one of the most extraordinary kinds of relationship.
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#2 - Edge of Life
Louis Theroux's LA Stories - Season 1 - Episode 2
Louis visits LA's most famous hospital, the Cedars-Sinai Medical Centre in West Hollywood, where he meets patients battling for their lives against serious illnesses. America spends a huge amount on health care and a hefty proportion goes on end of life care, with a wide and expensive array of treatments on offer to those with insurance or who qualify for government funded programmes. Louis talks to patients and their families as they face some of the toughest decisions imaginable - whether to accept death and die in relative comfort, or to gamble on further, possibly painful treatment in the hope that it will cure them or prolong their life. He also talks to the doctors whose job it is to guide people through this traumatic process. Over several months Louis explores the American way of death, which often involves never giving up and keeping faith right to the end.
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#3 - Part 2
Louis Theroux: By Reason of Insanity - Season 1 - Episode 2
Louis immerses himself in the world of Ohio's state psychiatric hospitals, meeting patients who have committed crimes - at times horrifically violent - while in the grip of severe mental illness. They have been found not guilty by reason of insanity and ordered by the courts to secure psychiatric facilities to receive the treatment that it is hoped will, one day, lead to their reintegration back into society. In the second episode of this two-part series, Louis spends time with patients whose personalities are so intertwined with their illness that it makes them more difficult to treat. In doing so, he examines the grey area between criminal actions and medical symptoms, and investigates how we define insanity.
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#4 - Part 1
Louis Theroux: By Reason of Insanity - Season 1 - Episode 1
Louis immerses himself in the world of Ohio's state psychiatric hospitals, meeting patients who have committed crimes - at times horrifically violent - while in the grip of severe mental illness. They have been found not guilty by reason of insanity and ordered by the courts to secure psychiatric facilities to receive the treatment that it is hoped will, one day, lead to their reintegration back into society. In this first of two parts, Louis spends time with patients attempting to come to terms with their crimes and the clinicians entrusted with helping to make them safe. And he investigates the difficult question - when is a patient with a serious crime in their past ready to be returned to the outside world?
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#5 - America's Most Dangerous Pets
Louis Theroux - Season 1 - Episode 19
According to some reports, there are now more tigers in captivity in the US than in the wild in the whole of Asia, as well as large numbers of lions, bears and chimpanzees. Travelling to America's heartlands, Louis Theroux spends time with an Oklahoma man who has bred and collected over 150 tigers, visits the woman who privately owns one of America's largest collections of chimpanzees, and finds himself in uncomfortably close contact with a number of big cats and dangerous primates.
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#6 - By Reason of Insanity: Part 1
Louis Theroux - Season 1 - Episode 23
Louis immerses himself in the world of Ohio's state psychiatric hospitals, meeting patients who have committed crimes - at times horrifically violent - while in the grip of severe mental illness. They have been found not guilty by reason of insanity and ordered by the courts to secure psychiatric facilities to receive the treatment that it is hoped will, one day, lead to their reintegration back into society.
Watch Now:Amazon
#7 - By Reason of Insanity: Part 2
Louis Theroux - Season 1 - Episode 24
In the second episode Louis spends time with patients whose personalities are so intertwined with their illness that it makes them more difficult to treat. In doing so, he examines the grey area between criminal actions and medical symptoms, and investigates how we define insanity.
Watch Now:Amazon
#8 - Dark States: Trafficking Sex
Louis Theroux - Season 1 - Episode 30
Houston, the fourth largest city in the US, is widely considered to be the number one hub for human trafficking in North America. The US Department of Justice estimates that at least one in five of all the country's victims are trafficked through the city, and most of these people will be forced to work in the sex industry. In Dark States - Trafficking Sex, Louis spends time with American women working in the city's illegal sex industry and explores the often complex dynamic between prostitute and pimp. He discovers a subculture that plays by rules that are morally challenging to most people and seeks to understand what stops these women breaking free. Louis also embeds with law enforcement on undercover operations and meets Vice Division officers tasked with persuading the working women to speak out against their pimps.
Watch Now:Amazon