![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/03\/mano_01_15_17_00-1.edit_-1038x778.jpg\")
\n Photo courtesy of Netflix<\/p>\n
\n Photo courtesy of Netflix<\/p>\n
It\u2019s only the second most famous stare in Britain \u2013 Paddington is top, of course \u2013 but Louis Theroux\u2019s \u201clooks\u201d have still frowned him through one of the more successful 21st-century careers in serious TV. Whereas the bear goes in for pure, chastening intensity, Theroux comes with a facial array of tics and gurns, the better to convey criticism and judgement: one-eye blinks, lib-nibbles, eyebrow-raises and side-eyes. As intrepid and socially conscious he may be, it\u2019s this rictus that has made Theroux a star, the concerned Everyman, greeting and gauging the weirdness of our time.<\/p>\n
My problem with Louis\u2019s looks has been that he too often levelled them at some obvious targets. Go looking for Christian fundamentalists or swingers or Neil Hamilton and, yes, you will be shocked and appalled. It always seemed a bourgeois variation upon reality TV rather than its antidote \u2013 another circus exploiting its freaks, even if this ringmaster passed through Westminster and Magdalen. But in recent years, Theroux has plumped for subjects of genuine journalistic enormity. His film on the Israeli settler movement last year was excellent, and this year it\u2019s the turn of \u201cthe manosphere\u201d \u2013 that amorphous, misogynistic, popular digital space that has become one of the moral crises of the moment.<\/p>\n
The film opens with a size gag. \u201cWe\u2019re the real deal. \u201cWe\u2019re not YouTubers,\u201d Theroux tells an influencer interviewee who comments on the scale of his camera rig. And there\u2019s immediately a sense of dominance and display at play here. There\u2019s also a sense of the new confronting the old, the digital meeting the analogue, the sans-culottes squaring up to King Louis himself. Few of the influencers really know who Theroux is (they call him, at different points, \u201cTher-oh\u201d and \u201cThur-ucks\u201d). But they sense a challenger. Even while they are being interviewed by Theroux, many of them film the interaction for their own podcasts and videos, unwilling to let him use them as content without a fair trade.<\/p>\n
All but one of Theroux\u2019s interviewees, British and American, were unknown to me, and to describe them individually is immediately mystifying, a parade of meaningless handles: Sneako, Myron Gaines, HSTikkyTokky. Fortunately, they\u2019re all playing the same game. These men film themselves leading attractive, opulent lifestyles, mostly filled by gym, money and women. (With small variations: HSTikkyTokky lives like he\u2019s on an endless lads\u2019 holiday, all jet-skis and leg day and blowjobs in toilets, while Theroux\u2019s American subjects are more Ottoman in style, believing in multiple wives and something called \u201cone-way monogamy\u201d.)<\/p>\n
![](\"https:\/\/dl6pgk4f88hky.cloudfront.net\/2021\/09\/TNS_master_logo.svg\"){kind=logo}
<\/a><\/p>\n