Before Sacha Baron Cohen and Nathan Fielder popularized a hyper-specific brand of pseudo-documentary, there was Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends. The BBC series, which first aired in 1998, featured the 27-year-old Theroux, a gangly Oxford-educated Brit, throwing himself into a different America subculture each week. These ranged from body builders in California to right-wing survivalists in Idaho to Black Nationalists in New York (an episode in which Theroux interviewed Al Sharpton). Theroux enters these worlds with impressive abandon, even appearing (briefly) in a porn film while he documents the world of video-pornography—he’s a 90s George Plimpton. But what makes the episodes transcendent is Theroux’s overwhelming empathy. He gets his subjects to bare themselves to him—and the camera—in a manner that’s both shocking and touching. Far from dated, Weird Weekends plays as well today as it did three decades ago, as evidenced by the fact that the rap song Theroux recorded during an Atlanta-based episode on hip-hop became a TikTok sensation last year (“my money don’t jiggle jiggle / it folds”). —Jensen Davis

Jensen Davis is a Junior Editor for AIR MAIL