I 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 am sorry to say is what they are calling it these days. The thought was this: “Hold on – when did I actually last watch a good documentary?”, and it did make me spool back a bit. When was it?
The problem, if you can call it that, possibly started with Netflix five years ago, when they figured (with Fyre then Tiger King then my beloved The Last Dance) that the key to documentary success was adding layers and layers of gloss: beautifully lit 4K to-camera interviews with everyone involved, editing upon editing upon editing, eight episodes of storytelling for four episodes’ worth of story. This works when the central engine has, say, Joe Exotic in it, but recent attempts to repeat the trick have resulted in some very overblown, overtold stories. Throw in the cultural obsession with true crime, whatever YouTube documentarians are doing, and BBC Three trying to find someone – anyone – to replace Stacey Dooley, and it feels as if the genre is in a weird spot. Channel 4 keep putting stuff out, but when was their last Dogging Tales?
Anyway, I am pleased to announce that we are so back. Follow the Leader sees Jamali Maddix go to the US to spend time with vigilante paedophile hunters, Colombia to learn more about passport bros, Chicago to make sense of the city’s gang scene and Pennsylvania to meet a pastor known as “King Bullethead”. It’s enjoyably old school – not peppered with awkward set-ups, made by a crew who can fit in one car, and very often the subjects say something so unexpected or do something so weird that it’s genuinely jarring – and it feels refreshing. Sometimes you really just need two cameras and a person with charm. We’ve overcomplicated it.
The wrong documentary would point to all these people and go: bit weird, aren’t they? But Follow the Leader always remembers to stick to its guiding principle, and the clue is in the title: what strange charisma is inherent in these leaders, what message are they preaching that resonates with people, that makes them have a following? Nobody would care about a paedophile hunter with no fans (and, equally, haters: there’s an excellent subplot in the first episode where two rival hunters loathe each other). There’s no story in American crypto bros going to Colombia to live in cheap sex-tourist luxury if they didn’t lure others over with the promise of a better lifestyle. King Bullethead is no one without his bulletettes. So what makes these people so alluring? And what’s going on with the people they allure?
It helps that Maddix is very good at this. As a standup, he was great as a grumpily funny early Taskmaster contestant, and was perfectly cast as interrupter-in-chief on the Never Mind the Buzzcocks reboot. But here he knows just when to push and when to pull: he has a matey openness with all the subjects that gets them to do that thing that makes good documentaries great – drop their guard and yap – and, in the case of the passport bros especially, everyone desperately wants him to like them.
Stories like these are told by the people, not the host, and Follow the Leader remembers that, but Maddix has a certain energy that seeps through anyway: scenes of people driving are often interrupted by him doing a sideways glance from the front seat and asking a joyfully pesky question, and there’s a brilliant behind-the-curtain moment in Colombia where he and a cameraman speculate about how weird a subject is about to be on camera (very).
An early morning paedophile sting is punctuated by him rubbing his eyes in the back of an eight-seater and moaning about how early the producer woke him up. It feels as if you’re hanging out at the house of a cool mate who has a wildly more frenzied YouTube algorithm than you do.
Crucially, there is new information in here. I knew nothing about passport bros – a sort of crypto- and red pill-adjacent men’s movement who go to developing countries where the dollar is strong to do laptop jobs, spend $250 a month on all their outgoings and flex awkwardly in clubs. There’s something unsettling about watching these men (it’s as if Maddix has discovered a remote island of people who never moved on from 2005’s The Game) but the real question is: how do they find each other, what drives them to do it, what are they looking for really? “Guy comes to the passport bro movement looking for a sense of direction,” Maddix narrates, before we watch a nervous newcomer buy a studded leather jacket, street-flirt with uninterested locals, then talk about how he really wants a wife.
I’m glad I know these people exist, and thankful I don’t have to interact with them. Documentary is back, baby!
