Louis Theroux announces new three-part documentary 'Altered States' on BBC2
The series will examine how changes in social attitudes and radical new laws have transformed American life
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Louis Theroux is to return with a new three-part documentary set to explore the strange ways America deals with love, birth, and death.
Louis Theroux’s Altered States, set to air on BBC Two later this year, will examine how changes in social attitudes and radical new laws have transformed the most intimate moments of an American’s life.
“Take My Baby”, the first episode, will examine the multi-million dollar private adoption industry, in which agencies, facilitators, and lawyers can earn thousands of dollars per baby by matching pregnant women prepared to give up their newborns with adoptive parents willing to pay up to $50,000 for the privilege.
The second episode, “Maximum Love”, will see Theroux travel to Portland, the US capital of polyamory and ethical non-monogamy, the practice of openly and transparently having multiple relationships that go further than just sex.
The series’s conclusion will examine the law, present in six states, that offers the terminally ill the option of ending their lives with a prescribed cocktail of drugs.
“I have always been interested in how people conduct the most intimate aspects of their lives,” Theroux said. “For this series we looked at the new ways Americans are approaching some of humanity’s oldest dilemmas: pregnant mums who feel unequipped to keep their babies and so pick new parents for them; the world of polyamory aka “ethical non-monogamy”; and people with debilitating conditions who opt to hasten their own deaths.”
"All of these stories have something a touch utopian about them, involving a kind of idealism and forward thinking that brings new opportunities but also new risks. I have been given extraordinary levels of access to courageous people and families across the United States, many of them enduring unbelievable levels of stress and anguish, and it was a privilege to be allowed into their lives in this most personal way.”
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