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Louis Theroux: Dark States begins its three-part run with Heroin Town, in Huntington, West Virginia, where users start off on a legitamate prescription for softer painkillers – sometimes following an unavoidable accident, but then if they can’t get enough, they resort to heroin and it’ll just take them out of it entirely, as they can’t keep down a job while shooting up $200 worth of junk on a daily basis. The overprescription of painkillers from doctors and a lack of job prospects also lead to a downward spiral for the residents.
In a place where narcotics fatalities are 13 times the national average, this episode shows that Louis Theroux certainly cares, but as an hour-long documentary where some want to get their life back on track, while others are happy to continue circling the drain until they can’t circle no more, this programme just felt like a straight-forward overview of the town and the problem. It didn’t offer any solutions. Maybe there aren’t any, but it left me expecting more.
Louis Theroux: Dark States continues next Sunday on BBC2 at 9pm and isn’t yet available to pre-order on Blu-ray or DVD. If you missed it, you can watch it on BBC iPlayer for 30 days after transmission.
The series isn’t yet scheduled for a DVD release, although many other of his documentaries already are.
Overall: 4/10
Presenter: Louis Theroux
Producer: Dan Child
Executive Producer: Peter Dale
Editor: Anna Price
Reviewer of movies, videogames and music since 1994. Aortic valve operation survivor from the same year. Running DVDfever.co.uk since 2000. Nobel Peace Prize winner 2021.