'You need to take a shower!" says a mother on America's Medicated Kids. "I showered yesterday!" sulks a sullen child. "You did not shower yesterday," says his mother. "Go and take a shower now." "Did he shower yesterday?" asks television presenter Louis Theroux from the corner. "No," confides the mother. "He hates to shower."

This surreally dull exchange reminded me of many a row I had myself as a preteen, apart from the presence of Louis Theroux, of course. Although, now that I think about it, I can't be certain Theroux wasn't there; he has a knack for blending into the decor. In recent years. Theroux has attempted to create more nuanced films than he did in his exploitative, eyebrow-raising, celebrity-baiting past (last year's The City Addicted to Crystal Meth and A Place for Paedophiles were much more mature offerings). But with this programme he seems to have taken a step backwards, in the process turning the documentary technique of freak-pointing, which he invented, into a more half-hearted freak shrug.

America's Medicated Kids sets itself up, with its title and location, as a mild-mannered British jab at those crazy Yanks, but Theroux (half-Yank himself) doesn't seem to have thought it through. The basic premise is that the American medical establishment is pathologising normal childhood behaviour (boldness, giddiness, sullenness, idiocy, hedonism) and unnecessarily medicating children. There's lots of evidence for this out there in the world of peer-reviewed academia, but there's very little in Theroux's documentary. Instead, we see mental-health professionals saying that the medications they prescribe allow troubled kids and their harried families to live normal lives, while Louis sits in the corner looking sceptical.

We never get to meet the children 'before' they were medicated, so although Louis often sounds right when he questions the status quo (when one child's 'symptoms' are described as "annoyingness affecting his functioning", Louis responds: "But some people think I'm annoying and in a sense it affects my functioning!") we can never be sure he actually is right.

So Louis moves in with the family of Hugh, a depressed, obsessive-compulsive preteen with Asperger Syndrome, and his mild-mannered assertions get even shakier. True, it doesn't seem right that virtually the whole household is on some sort of psychotropic medication (even the dog is on anti-anxiety drugs), but it's not so easy to prove that they don't need to be (after all, I'd be on anti-anxiety drugs if Louis Theroux was coming around to my house). So when Louis politely observes that Hugh's behaviour seems within normal limits and suggests that therefore he doesn't need to be on medication, his parents can credibly respond that Hugh's behaviour is within those limits because of his medication. Either position could be true. So there's neither a clear-cut sense of right and wrong, nor a troubling moral conflict to hook onto. Instead we get an hour of un-tested assertions lazily orbiting one another.

It's frustrating. At the very least documentaries like this should be titillatingly judgmental. Indeed, a programme about heavily-therapised, child-drugging Americans should be an absolute triumph of the form. It should have ended with the viewers on their high horses, filled with the righteous indignation, self-satisfied superiority, and flawed certainties of Middle Ireland. Instead, with my judgement reflex awoken fruitlessly (and now angered), the only clear-cut evidence of dodgy parenthood I could see was Hugh's family allowing Theroux and his camera crew into their home in the first place.

Over on Ryan Confidential, Gerry Ryan was playing counsellor to professional media entrepreneur Bill Cullen. Visually Ryan Confidential isn't hugely exciting: a shot of Bill Cullen's big head, a shot of Gerry Ryan's big head, a shot of Bill Cullen's big head, a shot of Gerry Ryan's big head. It's like a performance from Macnas.

And we already know far too much about Bill Cullen. He dragged himself up by the boot-straps, wrote a book about dragging himself up by the boot-straps, and now spends his time dragging himself from television network to television network by the boot-straps. His story is over-familiar. Most of the drama in Ryan Confidential comes from wondering what painstakingly-learned sycophantic facial expression Gerry is going to use in response to Bill's rose-and-soot-tinted meanderings (Will it be "the chuckling priest"? Will it be "the concerned tart"? Will it be "the thoughtful monkey"?).

Ultimately Gerry's facial expressions blend into Bill's tales of childhood poverty, tenement-living, and working-class self-improvement. We get the usual mother fixations one gets from wealthy Irish men of a certain age (Mrs Cullen was, unsurprisingly, a remarkable woman). We get the disingenuous assertion that anyone could do what he has done if they put the work in (this is underpinned by a zealous self-regard that hints he doesn't really believe this). And it's all held together by the 'because-we're-worth-it' bonhomie that always emerges when the well-paid get together at Montrose for a natter.

Towards the end of the programme Gerry did attempt a psychological 'gotcha' moment when Cullen refused to go off-message by discussing details of his failed marriage. "What are you scared of, Bill?" said Gerry earnestly, before repeating the words several times, as though this question alone would allow Bill to break character and say, "I'm scared of Wolf-Men, Gerry!". But no, Bill didn't tell Gerry what he was scared of. So I'll have to guess. I think Bill's scared that the rest of us will find out that he actually grew up in a leafy Dublin suburb, owned a pony, had a nanny, took holidays in the south of France, and inherited his business from his father, Lord Archibald Mackenzie Cullen the Fourth.

Earlier in the week, RTE had aired a remarkably good documentary called Growing Up Gay. It's only been 17 years since homosexuality was decriminalised in Ireland, but a programme looking at the experience of coming of age as a young gay person seems long overdue. For all the bad things that have happened to the Irish nation over the past few years, it's important to remember that in many of the ways that matter, this country is a far better place than it was 20 years ago. A less homophobic Irish people is a better Irish people, and that's a more meaningful measure of success than GDP. Not that we should congratulate ourselves too much – homophobic bullying is still widespread, and while it's easier for gay teens to come out, it's not easy (particularly when, as for some of the kids in this documentary, you're living in a small town or your father comes from a conservative Iraqi family).

Growing up Gay looks at 18 months in the lives of six young people who are variously defying and embracing the stereotypes, and have found the courage to be themselves. It's unflinchingly honest and true to its subjects; it never over-editorialises and it's both heart-breaking and heart-warming ("Nowhere is safe," says one open-minded but traditionally manly father of a gay teenager, before adding firmly, "but as long as I'm around, he will be safe"). Everyone should tune in for part two.

pfreyne@tribune.ie