TV Nation, which first aired in the summer of 1994, in its own small way, made history. Michael Moore, director of the shambling working-class documentaries Roger & Me and The Big One and the subsequent Bravo! cable program The Awful Truth, persuaded NBC to give him a run of hour-long shows that would enlist the talents of pop-culture correspondents from Karen Duffy to Steven Wright in the name of confrontational TV. Opening with a jump-cutting montage of loaded images, to the alternating synthesized plucked strings and heavy-metal guitar of tomandandy, and punctuated by nonsensical polls conducted by Widgery & Associates, TV Nation took Moore and his colleagues up (inside skyscrapers), down (into bomb shelters), and around the globe--even to the Ukraine--to confront the exploiters, polluters, and hypocrites threatening Moore's peaceable and generally liberal-minded view of the world.
When Louis Met... is a series of documentary films made by Bafta award-winning film-maker Louis Theroux. In the series, Theroux accompanies a different British celebrity in each programme as they go about their day-to-day business, interviewing them about their lives and experiences as he does so. His episode about the DJ and charity fund-raiser Sir Jimmy Savile (When Louis Met...Jimmy) was voted one of the top fifty documentaries of all time in a survey by Britain's Channel Four. In another episode ("When Louis Met...The Hamiltons"), the disgraced Tory MP Neil Hamilton and his wife Christine were arrested following false allegations of indecent assault during the course of filming.
Louis Theroux gives viewers the chance to get brief glimpses of things they wouldn't normally come into contact with. In most cases this means interviewing people with extreme beliefs of some kind, or diving into obscure or marginalized subcultures.