Jamali Maddix: Follow the Leader – This man made documentary great again!

me had a very loud thought while watching Jamali Maddix: Follow the Leader (Tuesday 17 September, 10pm), a new four-part series on U&Dave – which I’m sorry to say is being called today. The thought was “Wait – when was the last time I actually watched a good a documentary?”, and that put me at ease a bit. When was it?

The problem, if you can call it that, probably started at Netflix five years ago when they realized (with Fyre, then Tiger King, and then my beloved The Last Dance) that the key to documentary success was adding layers and layers of gloss: beautifully lit 4K on-camera interviews with everyone involved, montage after montage after montage, eight episodes of storytelling for four episodes worth of story. This works when there’s, say, Joe Exotic in the central engine, but recent attempts to repeat the trick have resulted in some very overblown, overdubbed stories. Add in the cultural obsession with true crime, whatever YouTube documentarians are doing and BBC Three trying to find someone – anyone – replace Stacey Dooley and it feels like the genre is in a strange place. Channel 4 keeps putting stuff out, but when was their last Dogging Tales?

Anyway, I’m happy to report that we’re back. Follow the host as Jamali Maddix heads to the US to spend some time with vigilante pedophile hunters, to Colombia to learn more about traveling brothers, to Chicago to understand the city’s gang scene, and to Pennsylvania to meet a pastor known as “King Bullethead”. It’s nice old school – no awkward setups made by a team that can fit in one car, and very often subjects say something so unexpected or do something so weird that it’s genuinely jarring – and it feels refreshing. Sometimes all you really need is two cameras and a person with charm. We made it too complicated.

A false documentary would point to all these people and say: a bit weird, isn’t it? But Follow the Leader always remembers to stick to its guiding principle, and the clue is in the title: what unusual charisma do these leaders possess, what message do they preach that resonates with people, that makes them followers? No one would be interested in a pedophile hunter without fans (and haters alike: there’s a great subplot in the first episode where two rival hunters hate each other). There is no story of America’s crypto brothers going to Colombia to live in cheap sex-tourist luxury, if they didn’t lure others to them with the promise of a better lifestyle. King Bullethead is nobody without his bullets. So why are these people so attractive? And what happens to the people who drug them?

It helps that Maddix is ​​very good at it. As a stand-up, he was great as the hilarious early Taskmaster contestant and was perfectly cast as the main interrupter in the Never Mind the Buzzcocks reboot. But here he knows exactly when to push and when to pull: he’s very open with all his subjects, which makes them do the thing that makes good documentaries great – they stop being cautious and snarky – and in the case of the Passport Brothers, above all, you everyone desperately wants to be liked by him.

Stories like this are told by people, not the host, and Follow the Leader remembers that, but Maddix has a certain energy that seeps through: he often interrupts scenes of people driving by looking sideways from the front seat and asking a cheerfully annoying question, and in Columbia has a brilliant moment behind the curtain as he and the cameraman speculate about how strange the subject will be on camera (very).

The early morning pedophile sting is interrupted by him rubbing his eyes in the back of the eight-seater and moaning about how early the producer woke him up. It feels like you’re hanging out at a cool dude’s house who has an insanely crazier YouTube algorithm than you.

It is essential that there is new information in here. I knew nothing about the Passport Brothers – a sort of crypto-and-red-pill neighborhood movement of men who go to developing countries where the dollar is strong to make laptops, spend $250 a month on all their expenses, and awkwardly guess at clubs. There’s something exciting about watching these men (like Maddix discovering a remote island of people who never moved from 2005’s The Game), but the real question is: how do they find each other, what drives them, what are they looking for true? “A guy comes into the traveling bro movement looking for a sense of direction,” Maddix narrates, before we watch the nervous newcomer buy a leather jacket with cylinders, flirt on the street with disinterested locals, then talk about how much he really wants a wife.

I’m glad to know these people exist and thankful I don’t have to interact with them. The documentary is back baby!