Called Louis Theroux: Surviving America’s Most Hated Family, he will explore the changes the family at the centre of the Westboro Baptist Church have gone through in recent years, particularly following the death of church founder and figurehead Pastor Fred Phelps, known as Gramps, in 2014.
Theroux first encountered the group – known for its anti-homosexual stance – for his 2007 documentary The Most Hated Family In America, and again for a follow-up in 2011 in America’s Most Hated Family In Crisis.
In the new programme, the broadcaster immerses himself into their world again to find out what happens when a group largely populated by one family loses its patriarch.
He meets Pastor Phelps’s granddaughter Megan, who has defected from the church and is one of its biggest critics.
He also meets a Bradford-born man who admires Westboro’s rhetoric given his own struggle to fit in with modern day Britain.
Theroux said: “I am always interested in how people change over time – physically and in their outlook – and even more so when they are involved in lifestyles that are somehow wrong-headed or self-sabotaging.
“With our unique access to the inner workings of the Westboro Baptist Church over the last 13 years, we’ve been able to track the changes in an extreme religious group from the inside, and also from the perspective of its ex-members.
“We’ve been able to tell a…
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