On March 11, 2026, Netflix released “Louis Theroux: Inside the Manosphere” from British documentarian Louis Theroux. Throughout it, Theroux meets with several major figures in the manosphere, a loosely affiliated conglomeration of influencers who cover everything from financial advice to gender politics to dating advice to fitness culture made primarily by and for men. The manosphere is often criticized for its extremist rhetoric, particularly how it dehumanizes women and calls for their subjugation, as well as for the unrealistic expectations it paints for young men and how it often preys on them economically. However, it is also notoriously hard to penetrate from the outside, often using coded language, in-group slang, and dogwhistles to obscure the meaning of what is being said, while being distrustful of mainstream media and self-isolating from them. Theroux’s documentary promised a much higher level of access to some of the major figures in this movement than was often available to traditional media.
I watched it about a week after it came out, and I’d heard some positive things, including many people calling it a must-watch. I’m not as familiar with Theroux’s work, but I also knew he was supposed to be a fairly well-respected documentarian. And while the list of interviewees is frankly not as broad as I was hoping based on how it was advertised, getting the hosts of Fresh and Fit podcast and Sneako is still pretty good – they are major figures who rarely do formal media interviews like this. So going into watching this, I was cautiously optimistic. The manosphere is notoriously difficult to talk about effectively, but this documentary did seem to have a lot going for it. I wanted to like this thing.
The results were, at best, an extremely mixed bag whose value depends heavily on what you are looking to get out of this. If you are someone who is not yet familiar with the manosphere and its rhetoric, this documentary could have some real value. It does do a decent job of introducing a lot in a relatively short time frame. If you are a young man who does buy into the idea of them as financial or fitness geniuses, and that is your main draw of the manosphere, I think this could also have some value. Seeing the frankly normal and everyday way some of these figures live when off-camera could be a decent reality check. It does do a good job of demonstrating the difference between the image these influences show and how they actually live and make their money. But if you’re someone who knows a few things about this topic already, this isn’t going to be anything new for you. Bluntly, if you are already in the circles where people are calling it a “must-watch”, you won’t gain much of anything by watching this.
One of the biggest failures of this show I think is ironically summed up quite well in its name: the focus on Theroux over the content of the actual show. It made me think of a sketch from then-College Humor, now-Dropout titled “This True Crime Documentary Will Make Me Famous”, in which the fictional documentarian ends up deciding that “maybe the story wasn’t about Trapp or Pat – instead, the story was about me”. This sketch was meant to be a satire of documentaries that focus on the people telling them rather than the actual content by parodying the trailer of one, except this is actually just how it felt to watch this show. The opening starts with streamer Sneako talking about Theroux and the fact he just did an interview with him – not with anything that even hints towards the actual content of the manosphere. In the very first interview with influencer Harrison Sullivan, Sullivan actually tried to talk to the camera while filming at the gym, and Theroux told him to talk to him instead. Even if there are real reasons to have the interviewee talk to the documentarian rather than the audience (which there can be, and I don’t think is inherently a bad thing), I’m not sure why you wouldn’t just remove that footage in post-production unless you want the audience to know the focus is on the documentarian. In a documentary that sells itself on its access to these figures, the decision to highlight Theroux over them felt like a major miss.
I’ve also seen a lot of people criticize this show for how it is willing to platform hateful rhetoric without pushing back on it, and I have some mixed opinions on this. I do think Theroux actually does push back more that people give him credit for, and I think there needs to be some grace given that, if he pushes back too much, he may lose the access that he has. He doesn’t want to alienate these influencers so much that they cut contact with him in the middle of recording, and he loses that access. As is, several of the influences he interviewed already seemed to consider him hostile, with Sneako saying at one point “I don’t think he likes me”. If he pushed much further, that may be a breaking point, and you do not want to lose access in this sort of situation.
Additionally, he does manage to get some of these influencers to say the quiet part out loud. One of the strongest moments for me is when Sullivan was talking about how some of his money comes from owning an OnlyFans (OF) managing agency, who manage sex workers on the platform. He says that he actually doesn’t like the industry (despite his girlfriend at the point of recording being an OF model), and would disown his daughter if she ever did sex work. Sullivan goes further to say that it would be like if his son came out as gay, and that he’d disown his son for that as well. Theroux then asked Sullivan if his views came from his mother, and Sullivan says, “My mum’s different. My mum would be disappointed that I said that… She hates racism, she hates homophobia, sexism… I wouldn’t say that [women should be cleaning] around my mum, I’d get a slap.” I’d agree with people who say that Theroux was probing more than challenging in this conversation, but that overlooks the fact that Sullivan, by saying his mother hates those types of discrimination and would hate what he was saying because of it, is saying that his rhetoric is racist, homophobic, and sexist. That’s a pretty strong admission right there, and it was gained through careful probing rather than challenging.
However, I do think that this documentary left a lot to be disappointed in the fact that it rarely followed up on the hateful rhetoric. Maybe bring on experts to discuss some of the actual statistics behind the claims that many of the influencers on this show (particularly Myron Gaines and Walter Weekes of the Fresh and Fit podcast) use as evidence for their ideology. Or, hell, reach out to Sullivan’s mother and see if she’s willing to comment on what her son was saying for the documentary. That simultaneously gives more background on where these influencers were coming from and presents an opposing viewpoint. While I think there should be some grace given in Theroux not challenging in the moment, there were ways that could be used to present a balanced view of these issues. Documentaries don’t need to be neutral. This one may not have been fully neutral, but it still should have taken a stronger stance.
For me, the biggest disappointment comes from the fact that Theroux just doesn’t really do what he promises: “[A]t [the] edges [of the manosphere] is a community of more extreme content creators. It was this world and its motivations I was most intrigued by.” The fact is, he really doesn’t dive that deep into the more extreme parts of the manosphere. The closest he probably got was when interviewing Sneako. While recording, a group of boys (likely around 14-15 based on their voices, though their faces were blurred and their identities are not public) ran up to Sneako and started asking him for photos. Theroux takes the opportunity to ask the boys what they knew about Sneako and what they thought of him, and they said “Some people think he’s a bit controversial… It’s usually about gender and s***… And the Jews… Some people are saying he like, he hates them.” Sneako, meanwhile, is trying to say he loves Jewish people, in a moment very reminiscent of a famous clip of him where a different group of similarly-aged fans come up to him saying “f*** women” and he desperately tries to say that he doesn’t hate women or promote that rhetoric. The fact that he keeps getting put in a situation where he is trying to moderate the language of his fans for a more public audience already says a lot, but he does try to moderate it at least.
There is a whole deeper level where there is no attempt to moderate it like this. For those who, like me, have been watching the manosphere develop for years now, you may remember a pair of videos about an YouTuber who goes by the name The Golden One that YouTuber Hbomberguy put out in 2015 and 2016, where Hbomberguy reacted to and criticized videos that The Golden One made promoting anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish people controlling the banks and government, what he called “International Jewry”, while defending Hitler’s economic policies. Fun fact: The Golden One is still around, actually, and as of writing this has 133,000 subscribers on YouTube, putting him in the top 1% of all YouTubers, so he’s not particularly obscure. Back on February 27, he put out a video that promoted the same “Aryan ancestral homeland” conspiracies that were the basis of the Nazi’s lebensraum policy. He’s very much part of the manosphere, and not only is he not alone in openly promoting these beliefs, but there are also people far more extreme than him. There is a wide gap between Sneako finding value in at least attempting to moderate his fans, and creators actively promoting Nazism. Theroux claimed to be investigating the more extreme ends of this community, but he didn’t even scratch the surface. “Inside the Manosphere” did not live up to what it claimed.
That said, I want to end off this review on at least somewhat of a positive note: I will give the editors of this documentary and the director Adrian Choa a lot of credit. They do a really good job of juxtaposing what is being said with the visuals on screen. For instance, while Sullivan is talking about how nice his house is and how much money he makes, the camera pans to show a hillside full of extremely similar houses. His house doesn’t look bad, but it’s not special, despite what he is saying. Meanwhile, while the camera focuses in on glamor shots of businessman and floating podcast guest Justin Waller’s expensive car and watch, Waller admits that he’s not actually as rich as Theroux guessed based on his appearance. It shows the wealth is just an act. It’s performative to look more successful than he actually might be. This is why I say this documentary could be good for people who are drawn in by the apparent financial success of these influencers. The editing and direction are really strong on breaking through that illusion.
Overall, this was a disappointing documentary that I think had the potential to be good, but that seemed to lack a desire to take it that extra step of analysis that it needed to be a worthwhile watch. There are many introductions to these concepts from YouTubers and video essayists that are much more successful in exposing this world than this documentary is.