Louis Theroux's documentaries

Louis Theroux is a british journalist and documentary filmmaker. He is mostly known for his The Most Hated Family in America doc, where he spent some time with infamous Westboro Baptist Church. They gained quite a notoriety for picketing funerals of US soldiers who lost their lives in Iraq and condemning homosexuals. In his time spent with WBC, Louis tried to gain more insight into the organisation and to see what is the (if there's any) reasoning behind their ideals and actions.
There is also somewhat of a "sequel" to the documentary called America's Most Hated Family in Crisis, where he revisits WBC and its members 4 years later to see what has changed. We see that some of them have left the WBC, some new joined but the organisation is still going strong despite the minor turbulence within.

These two documentaries which i described above are those that mostly made him well known in USA but he is considered respectable and renowned journalist in UK/Europe for a while now thanks to his acclaimed Weird Weekends, When Louis Met... and BBC 2 Specials (of all three mentioned, this one i would recommend the most, especially Louis and the Brothel, The Ultra Zionists and The City Addicted to Crystal Meth episodes)

Anyway, the reason for opening this topic is that Louis recently just moved to L.A. to continue working on his three new BBC 2 specials which will be aired every Sunday. Two of them are already out and you can watch them all via BBC iPlayer on bbc.co.uk (it's just a name for their own web player, no install necesarry or anything)

• Episode 1 of L.A. stories - City of Dogs
  "Los Angeles is home to more than a quarter of a million dogs - from the pampered pooches of Beverley Hills to the pit bull terriers of the projects. Louis Theroux enters the bizarre world of LA's dogs, meeting the characters whose lives revolve around the city's huge canine population.
  In the toughest neighbourhoods of south LA, he has a terrifying encounter with a 'weaponised' dog, trained to attack on command, and goes on patrol with 'Dogman', whose mission is to rescue some of the thousands of stray and feral pit bulls roaming the streets. At the city's biggest animal shelter, Louis meets the hard-pressed staff, whose heartbreaking job includes euthanizing thousands of unwanted dogs every year. He also encounters the middle-class Americans who adopt some of these delinquent dogs, as well as the colourful dog-training gurus who claim to be able to take the ghetto out of the dog once the dog has been rescued from the streets"

• Episode 2 of L.A. Stories - Edge of Life
  "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"

• Episode 3 of L.A. Stories - Sex Offenders
  "In the final episode of Louis Theroux's LA Stories, Louis spends time in the twilight world of the city's paroled sex offenders, whose crimes have made them pariahs living on the fringes of society.
  The state of California has some of the toughest regulations anywhere in America controlling sex offenders. On leaving prison they can spend years on parole, tagged and tracked, and a lifetime on an online sex offenders register.
  Louis spent several months at some of the hostels in Los Angeles where sex offenders live, talking in depth to sex offenders themselves as well as the people charged with monitoring them. The tough rules governing where they can live and who they can see make it hard for registered sex offenders to find work or even housing, and many are forced into homelessness.
  Meeting these outcasts Louis asks whether these tough rules keep society safer and when, if ever, it is right to give sex offenders a second chance"

I consider Mr. Theroux one of the best documentary filmmakers of today (if i would have to pinpoint, i would place him on good 3rd place, with Adam Curtis taking the 1st and Werner Herzog being the close 2nd) so hopefully this L.A. series will interest you to check out some of his other work(s)

bonus clip

EDIT
oh, forgot to mention this: if you have trouble accessing that BBC site from US, you might consider adding mediahint or hola on your Chrome browser to bypass the restriction. iPlayer is pretty neat, clear sharp video quality with zero lag or buffering + you can even turn on the captions, so why bother downloading a torrent or something when you can watch it directly there

REVIVE EDIT

Three new shows have been completed - By Reason of Insanity Part 1 & 2 are already available to watch on BBC's iPlayer here (for Part 1) and here (for Part 2). The final episode in this new series will be released on 5th April.

"In 'By Reason of Insanity', 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 treatment it is hoped will one day lead to their reintegration back into society.
Over the course of these two films Louis explores the nature of mental illness as he spends time with the small subsection of sufferers who have found themselves on the wrong side of the law. He bears witness to the extremes of the human condition and experience in an attempt to understand how society cares for some of its most vulnerable and most dangerous members."

• Part 1 - In the first episode of this two-part series, 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?
  "On my first day at Ohio's Summit Behavioral Healthcare Hospital I met Jonathan. Thirty-nine years old, at one time he'd been an engineering student. But for the past seven years he'd been confined to a mental institution.
  He showed me his room - it was bare but not uncomfortable, decorated and furnished in the style of a modern hospital. He had fitness magazines by the bed and a small selection of books.
  Then he told me his story - how he had killed his father, stabbing him to death seven years earlier while in the grip of mental illness, before being found NGRI, not guilty by reason of insanity, and sent to Summit.
  My idea had been to get to know some of the patients at a top American forensic facility. I wanted to meet men and women who have done some of the worst crimes imaginable - not through choice but under the influence of mental illness"

• Part 2 - In the second episode, Louis spends time with patients whose personalities are so intertwined with their illness 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.
  "We feature four main characters: Brian, a schizophrenic who beat his mum to death with a baseball bat believing she was possessed by the devil; Thomas, who killed a stranger in the streets (and has a diagnosis of "Anti-Social Personality Disorder" among other things); Charles, a very likeable and lively man with multiple bank robbery charges whose psychiatrist believes he may be faking symptoms to avoid a prison sentence; and Dean, a young man with a diagnosis of Borderline Personality Disorder who sexually assaulted his mother.
  All four are very different from each other, but the unifying theme to the show is the idea of "insanity" itself: how varied it is, and how difficult it can be to find the line between those crimes that are the result of mental illness and those crimes that are "ordinary" criminal actions committed by choice"

• Transgender Kids - Louis Theroux travels to San Francisco where a group of pioneering medical professionals help children who say they were born in the wrong body transition from boy to girl or girl to boy at ever younger ages.
  At the Child and Adolescent Gender Center at UCSF Hospital Louis meets children who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Louis is told that children as young as three can show signs of rejecting the gender they were assigned at birth, leaving parents with a difficult dilemma - do they start transitioning a child who is still developing their own identity or do they wait and risk making the change once their body has gone through the transformations of puberty?
  It is a decision that can be the start of a complex series of medical interventions, from puberty blockers to hormone replacement therapy and eventually gender reassignment surgery. Louis spends time with children and their families as they negotiate their way along this life-changing journey.