Deep in the heart of Miami, andMarbella, and just about every other heinous location filled with the ghouls of a superficial and soulless society, Louis Theroux, in Islington-Uncle attire, strides cautiously towards the steroid-filled biceps of modern male ‘influencers’ and the hyaluronic-acid pumped lips of their female counterparts, whose OnlyFans URLs may as well be tattooed across their cleavage in QR code form, such is the ‘cookie cutter’ template of every 18-30 year-old of these Instagram Cities.
Even the most ardent of Louis fans might start to wonder how he’s, in the words of Daniel Bedingfield, ‘gotta get Theroux this (or as the vast majority of the ‘Manosphere’ choose to pronounce it, ‘FUR-OOKS’). But as the world’s favourite investigative journalist starts to jiggle-jiggle his questions on the ‘red pill’ theory and the ‘matrix’ thrust into the spotlight by 2025’s hit-drama ‘Adolescence‘, all his subjects want to do is show Theroux how their money folds. None more so that the main antagonist of this Netflix special, the overgrown man-child know as ‘HS-TikkyTokky‘.
The British influencer (real name Harrison Sullivan), known for his gyn/workout content prickles from the off, when Louis quizzes him on why the size of a man’s biceps determine his ‘masculinity’ before joking that HS shouldn’t skip leg day so often, with a twist of his subtle signature wit. As the 90-minute production unravels, so does the character ofSullivan, who upon gentle digging is found to be selling unsavoury financial advice (Louis even injects £500 of his own money under an alias name, which results in a 70% loss within two months), and managing OnlyFans models who sell explicit boy-girl sexual content, despite Sullivan labelling viral pornographic actress Bonnie Blue as a ‘disgrace’.
TikkyTokky‘s severe addiction to controlling the narrative sees him accompanied by a camera-wielding pal at all times, who livestreams just about every second of his Nandrolone-filled chum’s daily happenings, including a live assault of a homosexual man on the street (Sullivan also adds that he would ‘disown’ any future children he may parent, if they came out as gay), and perhaps most bewilderingly of all, his interactions with Theroux, who he regularly attempts to undermine, bully, and embarrass, poking fun at the journalist’s ‘weak’ attempt on an electronic punch-bag machine, and trying to goad him into admitting a ‘friendship’ with Jimmy Saville; A nod to the iconic documentary ‘When Louis met Jimmy’, first broadcast on the BBC in April 2000. It is a rare moment in which Sullivan, or his team of researchers, show a grain of awareness of Theroux‘s journalistic prowess, and soon-after, scarper when Tokky‘s online following point out that Louis has the intelligence to ‘mug him off’ through this documentary.
With Tokky out of the picture, for now, Theroux turns his attentions to British ‘manfluencer’ Ed Matthews, known for promoting strict and often regressive gender roles, and Myron Gaines, the Miami-based host of the ‘Fit & Fresh’ podcast, a male-supremacist platform which builds on the success of Gaines’ 2023 book ‘Why Women Deserve Less’ in which he argues that the relationship between men and women in the modern day is essentially a cash-exchange equal to ‘prostitution’. Louis watches in amazement during a live recording of his podcast in which Gaines invites several women onto his show, only to hurl insults at, and humiliate them. Gaines picks his victims well. These aren’t intellectual business-women with a savvy brain and comprehensible debating skills. They’re women with a plastic surgeon on speed-dial, whose only source of income is to quite literally gag upon penis under the watchful lens of camera. Which raises the entirely valid question, as they sit through a barrage of abuse from Gaines… What’s in it for them?
The answer, which sadly may well validate Gaines theory on prostitution, is clout. Each girl is willing to be reduced to laughing stock status, if they can quickly mention their OnlyFans or Instagram handle in return, using Gaines’ huge social following to boost the amount of potential viewers to their audition(s) of fellatio skills, and consequently, their income. Gaines explains to Theroux that “any woman now has value if they have a v*gina and t*tties”, whereas men have to “earn their value”. Never has this been more true than in the case of Andrew Tate-disciple, Justin Waller, who spins Theroux around Florida in one of his flashy sports cars, reassuring the cameras that he doesn’t drive such vehicles for ‘attention’, despite leaving the engine loudly running whilst the car is parked up as they walk towards the inside of Waller‘s condo.
Here, we meet Waller‘s ‘Wife’, who – in an unnerving scene in which Waller brags about how she packs his condoms for him during overnight stays in their relationship of ‘one-way monogamy’, proudly declares how she does all the cooking and cleaning for their household, and two children, before revealing that her tag as ‘Wife’ is indeed only that, and that the two aren’t married. The telling moment in which worry is etched upon her face as she realises that she has no security in this situation whatsoever, and that once again, she’s become a slave to this insatiable female lust for finance. No matter how many times Waller cements his infidelity, or treats her as a ghost in the home of her own children, she’ll keep showing up for such abuse on a daily occurrence, with the promise of an indoor pool and a few glamorous Insta-stories sparkling in her retinas. It is a poignant reminder that if only this insatiable appetite for money could be eradicated, the Manosphere may have finally met their Kryptonite.
It is also here in Miami that we meet two brothers on Ocean Drive, who enrolled in Waller & Tate‘s ‘Hustler’s University’, adding how they need to avoid the ‘matrix’ of a 9-5 job as it ‘boxes you in’, before revealing that they’ve spent periods of their life being homeless. There’s a twist of bitter irony in realising that a 9-5 may have been the exact antidote to such a situation, but they add that the teachings of the Manosphere have educated them on how men ‘use pain to fuel us’. “We don’t deserve to be happy” adds the older brother, before Theroux probes the whereabouts of their third sibling. “He committed suicide,” the younger brother interjects, before adding “but we don’t think about that.”
By the time Louis links up with ‘Sneako’ in New York, a viral superstar banned from all social media channels, including TikTok and YouTube for ‘spreading misinformation and anti-semite conspiracies’, the popularity of these manosphere figures has never been more apparent than the moment a group of teenagers mob their hero in Manhattan, telling Theroux that Sneako ‘can’t be cancelled, he’s everywhere’. When the New Yorker, who tells camera crew he has to wear a balaclava outside to avoid being recognised, such is his level of fame in 2025, starts asking Theroux his views on the Epstein-cult running Hollywood, and Sam Smith‘s rituals of satanic worship, we see a running theme of the Manosphere’s demographic.
Dangerously, so many of this audience is a pubescent following stuck between the purgatory of boyhood and adulthood, balancing delicately between the ever-lurching hormones, and surging testosterone levels, mixed with a potent cocktail of female rejection and pent-up sexual frustration. By the time HSTikkyTokky returns for the show’s finale, he rebukes Theroux‘s claims that most of his audience are most likely around the 14 to 15 year-old mark, before turning the lens of Theroux himself, in a Truman-Show burst through the 4th wall. From the show’s title, it was clear Louis attempted to immerse himself ‘inside’ the Manosphere to gain a better understanding of it. Instead, he’s faced with the task of an uphill-swim through a tsunami of chaos and aggression, with a poignant pause for thought from Tokky arriving when Theroux grills him on why he doesn’t use his platform to be a ‘good person’ instead.
With a mix of defiance and obnoxious arrogance, his expressionless eyes stare back into the distant. “If I’d just done good things, I would never have blown up on social media.”
‘Louis Theroux: Inside The Manosphere’ is out now on Netflix.