The Liver King review – I am rarely this nauseated by anything
We don't get to say 'Only in America!', complete with a wry smile and a shake of the head, enough any more. The things they have are either too serious (Trump, mass shootings, their police) or we are closing in on their achievements with our own (Boris, knifings, our police).
Untold: The Liver King grants us this boon once more. For the Liver King – AKA Brian Johnson – is a phenomenon with 'Only in America!' stamped through him like a stick of rock. Though in his case you would probably have to say 'stick of salami'. Because the Liver King eats virtually nothing but raw meat. Usually beef liver, but other bovine organs – especially testicles – will do nicely as well. There is ample evidence available via his social media videos, should you wish to check them out. Many of them are played in this 70-minute documentary, which is how I know to advise you not to do so. I am both a committed carnivore and rarely nauseated by anything, but it turns out that even I have a hard limit on the number of bull testes I can see one man masticate over the course of an hour. If you think I'm a Celebrity … Get Me Out of Here! has prepared you, it has not.
Anyway. Johnson was born in 1978 in Texas, the only place a real Only in America American should be born. His father died when he was a toddler, his brother was the golden boy and little Brian was forever searching for ways to compete with the shadow and the shine. First he discovered the gym ('Like the most beautiful fucking playground') and got strong. Then he discovered Arnold Schwarzenegger films and Rambo: First Blood and got inspired. 'I made myself the exact man – a savage fucking king – that I always wanted to be. I could be my hero.'
But can you be a true hero without an emotionally powerful origin story? By 2013, once-little-now-jacked Johnson had two boys of his own – Rad Ical and Stryker – with his wife, Barbara, who were constantly ill and being taken to hospital with life-threatening allergies.
Johnson started reading up on health matters and came across the concept of 'ancestral living'. You throw out everything processed and start living on raw eggs, bone broth and meat – the more hepatic the better – and abiding by the Nine Tenets, 'the life forces that have nourished us for millions of years'; sleep, eat, move, shield (yourself from wifi and phone radiation etc), connect (with the Earth by going barefoot everywhere), fight (or at least accumulate guns and mount some of them above your bed) and bond (with everyone willing to eat testicles with you).
Ancestral living not only cured the boys but gave Johnson a mission. He would spread the word, rename himself The Liver King AND create a dietary supplements company for those poor unfortunates who couldn't kill their own bulls and lay hands on fresh liver and balls whenever they needed to.
The business was a wild success, and after he employed 'hybrid marketing, talent and branding agency', 1DS Collective, led by John Hyland, to school him in the ways of TikTok and Instagram, he became famous as its face and named his followers 'primals'.
After he started appearing on high-profile podcasts, however, the backlash began. Some people – weak people! People who doubtless threw away offal, cooked their steaks and fried their eggs! – began wondering if a physique like the Liver King's could really be attained through raw food and nine tenets unless at least one of those nine tenets was 'massive steroid intake'. The King denied the idea loud, long and publicly until the day incontrovertible proof was provided. The wheels duly came off.
So, too, do they then come off the programme. The story of the Liver King is, in television terms, only half a story. He rose, he fell, and … that's it. He not-too-reluctantly admits on camera to taking huge doses of human growth hormone, and in the closing minutes blithely describes the lucrative scam he ran at his very first job and how he moved into printing money, making drugs in his apartment then trading them internationally and how his perception of risk became distorted because he never got caught. He has Googled 'repent' and 'atonement', he informs us chirpily, and assures us that he feels 'shame, sorrow, guilt, regret … nothing's more real than that'.
Six months on he has started eating vegetables and wondering whether he was too intense before. 'I love the man that I am now.'
The only moment of wider reflection comes from the disillusioned chief executive of the supplements holding company, Ben Johnson, who asks 'what we are risking through a reckless relationship with the truth?' It's a good question, but there's a lot of balls to get through first.
The Liver King is on Netflix now.
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