There’s only one thing I don’t like about Documentary Now! The Complete Series, a new Blu-ray set, from Mill Creek Entertainment, featuring all four seasons of the IFC series: The “complete” implies that the series is over.
Seemingly a TV series directed at me personally, Documentary Now! had a brilliant conceit: Each episode is a parody of a classic documentary, shot in that film’s style and aesthetic, usually featuring some combination of the show’s co-creators Fred Armisen and Bill Hader, along with guest stars (Seth Meyers and Rhys Thomas are the other co-creators, while Alex Buono and Thomas directed most of the episodes; John Mulaney wrote several episodes.) Helen Mirren fronted each episode as the narrator.
The show got its start when the creators, during their SNL days, made a punk rock mockumentary, and had so much fun doing it that they had the idea of a whole series of just that. The show is full of SNL alums, but doesn’t feel much like SNL or most other SNL successor projects. But that a network said yes, and bankrolled four seasons, is almost a miracle.
The first episode, Sandy Passage, featuring both Hader and Armisen in drag in a parody of Grey Gardens, is fairly representative. Each episode is funny if you’ve seen the documentary it’s parodying, and usually also on its own merits.
Four seasons, and a total of 27 episodes, were produced between 2015 and 2022 and featured on IFC, as on top of the pandemic, it likely took a while to get all of these busy people together. Hader, likely busy at the time with Barry, wasn’t in the last two seasons.
Blu-Ray Set
The handsome Blu-ray set consists of four discs, one for each season, while the fourth includes bonus features, the best of which is a Paley Center panel in which Hader, Meyers, and Armisen discuss their creative process, and how they came up with certain ideas. (I couldn’t stop laughing when Hader had to explain why they never did a Shoah parody.) There’s also a very handsome 28-page booklet, as well as poster cards.
Sure, all the seasons are streaming on both AMC+ and Netflix. But they might not be forever, and the set is worth it for that reason.
I’m sad it’s likely over, but all the time, I see a documentary and wonder what Documentary Now! might have done with it.
The 5 Best Episodes
Original Cast Album: Co-Op
Documentary Now!’s greatest achievement was this parody of D. A. Pennebaker’s Original Cast Album: Company, featuring the tense, all-night recording session of a 1970s Broadway show. They wrote original songs that approximated the real ones, and cost Broadway veterans like Richard Kind, Renee Elise Goldsberry, and Alex Brightman.
How They Threw Rocks
An amazing parody of the Oscar-winning Rumble in the Jungle documentary When We Were Kings, featuring a fake Welsh sport called Craig Maes, which is essentially dodgeball with rocks. The fight stuff is great, but even better is the undercurrent of a feud between the sort of aging sportswriters who are the backbone of every Muhammad Ali documentary.
DRONEZ: The Hunt for El Chingon
This parody of Vice News’ foreign travelogue documentaries of the aughts nails absolutely everything about those films: The aesthetic, the reporters’ arrogance and condescension, and the fetishism of the third world. (“Just because you put on a fucking safari helmet and looked at some poop”) as the late great David Carr memorably dressed down Vice’s Shane Smith, who Jack Black channels in the Documentary Now! episode.) There’s also an inspired gag in which pairs of reporters (always played by Armisen and Hader) keep getting killed and replaced by others.
Parker Gail’s Location Is Everything
The show did parodies of specific filmmakers’ oeuvres, especially those of Werner Herzog and Agnes Varda. But I particularly loved this one’s homage to the work of Spalding Gray, and the Jonathan Demme-directed Swimming to Cambodia.
My Monkey Grifter
Most of the Documentary Now! parodies are produced with some degree of reverence for the original film, whatever it was. But this parody of My Octopus Teacher, in which a documentarian forms an attachment with a monkey who scams him, seems to have much (deserved) contempt for the source material.
