We Are Family:Louis Theroux, Altered States.

"Woe is me. Shame and scandal in the family" - Shame and Scandal in the Family, Sir Lancelot.

The judiciously edited minor key music seeps in and Louis Theroux raises a quizzical eyebrow, now a trademark move, before lowering his tone and asking how you are. You can almost see his brain working. Does he now ask a pertinent question? What about an impertinent one? Maybe now is the time for sympathy?

We've all been there when confronted with a friend undergoing something of an emotional crisis, often unsure of exactly how best to respond. But for Louis, this has a couple of extra dimensions. Firstly, these people aren't really his friends. Whilst relationships tend to be amicable and I don't doubt Louis' sincerity in wanting the best for them, this does lead us to what must surely be another thing running through Theroux's mind. Will this make good television?

Mostly, it does and, mostly, he gets the balance right by allowing his subjects to tell their own stories. He tends to gently prod them to open up rather than force them and it's a technique that pays handsome dividends. Most people are quite keen to talk about their own lives, their own fears, and their own desires if only you provide a sympathetic, or empathetic, ear and it's to Louis Thereoux's credit that he very much does that.

In his new BBC2 series, Louis Theroux, Altered States, he goes straight for some of the most divisive, and emotional, topics of our time. Polyamory in 'Love without Limits', assisted suicide in 'Choosing Death', and open adoption in 'Take my Baby'. As Louis drives up and down the West Coast, mostly California and Oregon, popping in to take the emotional temperature of his subjects/guests, those of us at home watching inevitably and unsurprisingly well up with tears.

I do anyway. I got through 'Love without Limits' without a tear but it was only thirteen minutes into 'Take my Baby' before I was off and the metaphorical handkerchief was out after only eleven during 'Choosing Death'. I used to have a friend who loathed Theroux (to be honest, this ex-friend loathed pretty much everything and everybody, part of the reason he is no longer a friend) but I've always warmed to his style. It's tender, it's tinged with sadness and awareness, and it's occasionally funny too. He gets involved.

During 'Love without Limits' we see Louis join a 'sex-positive Portland' event. A blindfolded sensual dinner in which complete strangers fondle each other's naked, or at least partly dressed, bodies. Louis describes it as being both liberating and embarrassing at the same time. Which sounds about right. He is a Brit, after all.

This is towards the end of the episode and by then we've met several people who are in polyamorous relationships. They're pretty ordinary types. IT analysts, therapists, and hippies (hey, it's California) are all united in their hope of finding 'pleasure without guilt' or 'ethical non-monogamy', something that is very much on the upswing in the US at the moment.

Many of the people involved are married or in long term relationships and even have kids. Which leads to the rather cute, if somewhat awkward, explanation to one child that "grown ups have sleepovers" too! There's lots of other amusing stuff too. The concept of 'thrupples', the dynamics of spooning, and a guy called Q (possibly not his real name) who rocks up at a class to teach the curious how best to use sex toys.

But, obviously, Louis wants to crack open this egg (something he does literally as he dons an apron and helps out making omelettes ready for dinner) and find out what underpins the decision to go polyamorous, how people broach the idea of 'opening up' their relationship, and if polyamory is really just a form of 'slow divorce'.

Amanda, Nick, and Bob live together as a 'thrupple'. Threesomes didn't work for them so now they work to their strengths. The boys work different hours so Amanda gets intimacy with Nick and Bob at different times. Nick was already on the scene but Bob "lasts a really long time" so now Nick tends to focus on foreplay, which is his strength. When Bob takes over, Nick goes off to play video games. Sometimes the three of them get together to play Dungeons & Dragons. They all sleep in a big bed together.

Q is with AJ who's having a baby with Mattias. Mattias would appear to be slightly in denial about the whole situation. Love gets dangerous, for sure, but then love can, even in monogamous relationships. As with any ever other relationship, it can feel like one person is more in control than the other (or others). There are gambles and compromises involved. You might get more love, you may end up lonely, or jealous.

When the resigned looking, and softly spoken, Jerry talks of the period of "adjustment" he underwent when his wife Heidi first decided to take Joe as a lover I was reminded of a couplet Leonard Cohen penned for Famous Blue Raincoat:-

"Thanks, for the trouble you took from her eyes, I thought it was there for good so I never tried"

If love can often be very uncertain then death is, for all of us, absolutely certain. The only thing we don't know is when, or how, it will arrive. So, perhaps it's no surprise that some seek to take control of that decision for themselves.

In 'Choosing Death' we meet some who are doing just that. Gus, a retiree in San Luis Obispo, is about as likeable as anyone you've ever seen on television. He's got two daughters and a wife who clearly dote on him as much as he does them, and he's just become a grandad. It's also estimated that he has less than six months to live having been diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer.

The adorable, affable Gus seems content with his decision and describes his new grandson as his 'immortality'. Sixty-five year old Deborah's decision seems to have come from a darker place. She's wheelchair bound and still, clearly, processing a huge amount of grief following the death of her beloved husband, David.

Both her brain and her body are beginning to fail her and the only medicine that could help her is beyond her price range, the lack of affordable health care in America drives people to early deaths in indirect ways as well as direct ones. Deborah wants to die looking out across the beautiful Oregon coastline to the seemingly endless Pacific beyond.

Deborah's got 'broken heart syndrome', she's thrown away all her family photos saying "who's gonna want to see my photos if I don't have a family", and she's reached that point where society says it doesn't want her to die but does nothing to help her stay alive.

But there are people who want to help her die. Deborah gets in touch with Lowrey and Brian from the Final Exit Network who are keen to give people the tools to end their lives should they be in such intense physical pain that life has become unbearable. Not just physical pain either. The Final Exit Network consider dementia and Alzheimer's to cause a psychological pain so extreme that death can be preferable.

Lowrey and Brian can't actually assist people in their suicide. But they can offer 'technical advice' to the terminally ill (or even, a tacit contention suggests, the heartbroken) and that technical advice, protected in law by the First Amendment, is pretty full on. They show Deborah what kind of kit she could use if she was to decide to do herself in.

There's something a little over zealous about Lowrey and Brian, almost evangelical. At times I'd go as far as saying they're a little creepy, as if they're enjoying playing god with other people's lives. But the sad truth is that capitalist society prefers the fond memory of a dead loved one to the complicated reality, or burden, of a living problem.

This is even true in Gus's loving family. As Gus reads the instruction on the pills he's taking to kill him (which, paradoxically, may extend his life) he jokes that the instructions read simply:-

1. Swallow
2. Die
3. Repeat if necessary  

Gus also joshes about washing them down with a glass of Dom Perignon but as his family gather round his bedside to say their final goodbyes the laughter soon turns to tears. In Grayson Perry's recent Rites of Passage series we were introduced to terminally ill people who had taken control of their own funerals. Here we went a step further and met people taking control of, if not exactly embracing, their own deaths.

We're all painfully aware that one day we must die, one day we must say goodbye to everything and everybody we know, but if we can, in some way, influence how this happens in our own lives then why begrudge, or ban, that. Although, I'd suggest keeping an eye on the Final Exit Network.

Birth, however, is something none of us ever have control of. It just happens to us and most of us pretty much take it for granted. Our brains haven't developed enough to do otherwise. But, for some, for many in fact, it's not so straightforward. 'Take my Baby' looks at the burgeoning open adoption industry in southern California.

Irene and Mel run the open adoption agency Rainbow's End with the aim of facilitating the 'exchange' of children from parents who are unable to, or feel they are unable to, look after them to those who are either unable to have their own biologically or to those who already have but both love kids so much and have the resources to look after them that they want more.

The brochures Rainbow's End use are highly professional looking (open adoption is a billion dollar industry in the US) but, sometimes, the people they deal with are only professional in their criminality. Most women who give up their babies do so because they have drug problems, because they're in and out of prison, or, simply, this is America, for money and most are very honest about their motivation.

Amy and Ari in Dallas, Texas already have three kids but they're hoping for another. In fact they've paid a quite significant sum to give Patricia's new baby a home and a good start in life. Unfortunately, Patricia, who has met with and wooed Amy and Ari, has other ideas. She does a runner with the cash and leaves Amy and Ari financially depleted but, far more importantly, emotionally devastated - and, as it turns out, not for the first time. A lingering image of an empty cot is enough to render you a weeping wreck.

That's the bleakest scenario played out and one that touches on the grey areas that this programme, and all recent Louis Theroux programmes, set out to explore. Elsewhere, the stories of open adoption are more positive, if equally affecting. Jessica is twenty, she doesn't drink, she doesn't do drugs, she's got no criminal record, and she's in a relationship. But she's giving up her baby to Kat, who is unable to conceive herself, and Kat is even there at Jessica's eight month scan.

Jessica's mother is clearly struggling to come to terms that she won't be involved with her grandchild but perhaps in the story of Isaiah and his adoptive mother Joanne there is hope. They seem to have a healthy mom'n'son relationship, dad seems a good 'un too, there's a much elder, also adopted, brother, and, most heartwarming of all, both Isaiah and his elder brother's birth mothers occasionally pop round for big, extended, family days.

It takes a lot of steeliness and no little inner fortitude to get to that place, I'm sure, but it seems like a journey worth making. Of course, for some, it's not possible but in this open adoption is no different from more traditional forms of adoption or bringing up children in any circumstances whatsoever.

There's lots of looking for doubt in this series but, for the most part, Louis doesn't find any more doubt than you'd find in more traditional families, more conventional relationships. Louis Theroux may have been looking to unearth weirdness but what he really discovered was normality. Birth, love, and death are scary and concerning for all of us, conventional or not, and in taking a magnifying glass to some of the more unorthodox, or simply newer, approaches to some of life's most important issues he didn't reveal anything particularly new.

In fact that magnifying glass, if looked through for long enough, starts to look like a mirror. These people may or may not be different to us in the way they approach life but in their desires, their wishes, their hearts, and their souls they look remarkably similar. Mostly, they just want love.

"The hardest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and to be loved in return" - Orchestra of Wolves, Gallows.