In a completely different way, IFC’s “Documentary Now!” has plenty to say about moviemaking, specifically the world of nonfiction films. The first season, co-created by “Saturday Night Live” alums Fred Armisen, Bill Hader and Seth Meyers, concluded last month but each 30-minute episode is available online through Oct. 23 (at ifc.com/watch-now/).
It might be one of the best shows of 2015, and I’m not just saying that as someone who watches and writes about documentaries for a living. Hader has never been more versatile and the writing and directing is extremely sharp and knowing.
Each episode is a parody, taking on well-known documentaries such as 1975’s “Grey Gardens” (here rendered as “Sandy Passage”), 1922’s “Nanook of the North” (“Kunuk Uncovered”) or the epic 2013 rock doc “History of the Eagles” (“Gentle & Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee,” the two-part finale that is a truly brilliant piece of television).
Each episode is a close-read, capturing the precise aesthetics — the look, the format, the approach — of the documentary it’s satirizing, but it’s done with serious affection. (Only one episode openly mocks its source material: “DRONEZ,” which gives the smug-hipster “Vice” documentary style a swift kick in the rear.)
“I have nothing but good things to say about the series,” said Jamie Meltzer, a filmmaker who teaches documentary filmmaking at Stanford University. “There’s been a whole subgenre of mockumentaries going back quite a ways, and they are a good way to question the ethics and aesthetics of the documentary form and make audiences more critical viewers, in a good way. The level of detail here is sort of astounding to me. It’s an amazing series for a documentary nerd.”
But whereas Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries tend to focus on a subculture, “Documentary Now!” is deeply investigating how a film’s style can inform everything. Armisen gives his least schticky performance in “The Blue Jean Committee” episode, as a Chicago meatpacker-turned-1970s-soft-rock-superstar-turned-meatpacker-again, a performance that channels yet another music documentary, 2008’s “Anvil: The Story of Anvil.”
“They’re mashing up references,” said Meltzer, and that’s also true of “Sandy Passage,” which devolves into a found footage horror movie. The documentary’s subjects end up slaughtering the filmmakers, which is wonderfully meta; surely there are people so unhappy with how they’ve been portrayed in a film, they’ve contemplated a few horrors of their own.
Each episode features a PBS-aping intro by Helen Mirren. “I almost hesitate to say it because I’ve had a film air on ‘Independent Lens,’ but what Helen Mirren is doing is the perfect satire of a PBS introduction,” Meltzer said. “It made me cringe, it was so perfect. But because it’s so perfect, it’s totally hilarious.”
