Ellie Nutall, and Harrison Sullivan (HS Tikky Tokky), in Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere.Netflix
Nothing’s tapped into the widespread anxiety about the online radicalization of boys and young men quite like Adolescence, the television drama that premiered on Netflix last year.
But its British writers were smart enough to not get into specifics about what exactly Jamie, the fictional 13-year-old everyboy, had been consuming on his feeds before murdering a female classmate.
Passing references to the execrable kick-boxing influencer Andrew Tate and “involuntary celibates” were there to give flavour, but parents came away with a single strong message: “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your kids are online?”
The result was campaigns around the world focusing on the roots of the issue: the drug of social media and the delivery device of the smartphone.
Now, a little more than a year later, Netflix is releasing what’s been framed as a kind of follow-up to Adolescence: a non-fiction look at the so-called manosphere from British deadpan documentarian Louis Theroux.
Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere takes a step back from the problem to focus on the symptoms: attention-seeking extremists who come and go in whack-a-mole fashion.
(L to R) Justin Waller, Louis Theroux, in Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere. Cr. Courtesy of Netflix © 2026Netflix
The 90-minute doc will allow those whose algorithms are blessedly Tate-free to learn more about his ilk. And perhaps it will help a red-pilled kid or two figure out that the manosphere is populated by scam artists – and that the victims, first and foremost, are the males whose money they are after.
But Inside the Manosphere is undercut by questions of who exactly is creating content for whom.
Theroux, who’s parted ways with the BBC after more than a quarter century, has a quietly confrontational approach to documentary that is not quite satirical, not quite reality TV, yet contains elements of both.
For decades now, from Weird Weekends on, he’s been embedding with oddballs, cultists and extremists, capturing the edgy (and entertaining) encounters that ensue when he asks them direct questions.
But it’s an approach that turns tricky when it comes to social-media influencers, as they have their own cameras to train on him in return.
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Throughout Inside the Manosphere, the interview subjects make content out of Theroux (himself a semi-celebrity) following them around. The documentarian goes on one’s hateful podcast and is livestreamed by others.
He then, in turn, incorporates their content about him back into his content about them.
Of the nebulously defined constellation of content creation known as the “manosphere,” Theroux directs most of his attention toward the subset concerned primarily with fitness, wealth and women.
Harrison Sullivan is the central figure.
Sullivan, known as HSTikkyTokky online, is a British bodybuilder in his early twenties who, in-between beach workouts, tells his male viewers about “the matrix” – the idea that the mainstream media is lying to them, there’s a war on men under way, and they must take the red pill and wake up.
Louis Theroux and Sullivan in Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere.Netflix
Sullivan, of course, tells people that they’re being lied to so that he can sell to them. His TikTok entices viewers to follow him on Telegram, where they might be sold on dubious investment vehicles, for example. He also makes money off OnlyFans models even as he preaches about the evils of pornography.
In his interviews with Theroux, Sullivan is frank about being a “salesman” working in the “attention economy.” Extreme content – misogyny, homophobia, livestreamed “predator stings” – lures in customers.
At one point, Theroux asks Sullivan directly: “Why not try and be a good person?”
“If I’d just done good things, I would never have really have blown up on social media in the first place,” Sullivan replies.
That’s really all you need to know. But Inside the Manosphere also goes deep with other such figures. Theroux speaks with Amrou Fudl a.k.a. Myron Gaines, who hosts a woman-hating podcast called Fresh and Fit; Justin Waller, a wealth influencer who spreads the gospel of “one-sided monogamy”; and Sneako, who’s actually left the red-pill business behind for conspiracy theories and religion.
Theroux and Amro Fudl (Myron Gaines) in Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere.Netflix
All three of those individuals made the news two months ago for being in a Miami club alongside Tate and far-right influencers Nick Fuentes and Braden Peters (known as Clavicular) during a singalong to Heil Hitler by Kanye West, now known simply as Ye.
Indeed, Inside the Manosphere concludes that preying on male anxieties about sex, money and body image is not enough to cut through the noise any more. You’ve got to go even more extreme, which, in practice, means stoking that old reliable hatred of Jewish people.
The final confrontation between Theroux and Sullivan involves the influencer saying his antisemitic comments online are merely “clip-farming” and staged to go viral.
Meanwhile his cameraman shoots Theroux for content.
“The Jews are your daddy,” Sullivan taunts.
A parting thought: When I was lad, I was told that “mainstream media” – a term that includes everything from your local newspaper to Fox News – was lying to me, too.
This message came primarily then from the left, from people such as American rabble-rousing doc maker Michael Moore, who gave Theroux his first TV job on his series TV Nation (1994-1995).
“Point your cameras at the cameras,” Moore said in a 2014 speech in Toronto. “Show the people why they’re not being told what’s going on by the mainstream media.”
I wish that ethos had wrought a generation of media literates rather than this ouroboros.