Documentary Now!, the fake doc series that’s really good

The great Chantal Akerman, who made films both real and imagined, was slightly more succinct. She simply stated, “There is only fiction.”

Even the incredible documentaries of Frederick Wiseman, which appear to simply plop a camera in front of various notable institutions (the court system, the police, the National Gallery) and let it go, are intricately edited from days and days of footage into a recognisable whole.

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But most documentarians (Herzog excluded) don’t like you to think about the tricks and techniques they employ to present an entertaining, and, more importantly, authentic visual document. They prefer to hide their sorcery behind shaky cameras, garbled dialogue and a neat, thrilling resolution.

So I contend that the comedy parody series Documentary Now!, which offers remade versions of some of the classics of the genre has, in fact, evolved into one of the finest versions of the actual thing it attempts to parody.

Yes, it’s scripted (so are documentaries, you think they’re making up that narration while sitting in the booth?). Yes, they’re actors (one of the greatest documentaries ever made, Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, was excluded from the Academy Awards for using reconstruction).

Yes, it’s completely stupid (documentaries can be this too – have you seen Some Kind of Monster or The Decline of Western Civilisation Part Two: The Metal Years?) And after four seasons and 27 episodes, and now a lavish coffee table book, it possesses an attention to detail lacking in cinema, both fiction and non, to the point where it must be considered on a par with the exponents it attempts to emulate.

Documentary Now! presents their parodies absolutely bone-dry, with not a drop of irony included. Obviously, things are included for comic effect (monkeys probably can’t organise elaborate grifts, Iceland doesn’t have an annual Al Capone festival, atlas and globe salesmen don’t have such an unhealthy rivalry), but the series so rigidly exists in its own constructed universe that it only drifts slightly left of centre from the original source material. For this we must commend its creators.

At the tail end of their Saturday Night Live tenure, Bill Hader and Fred Armisen filmed a parody of the Sex Pistols film The Filth and the Fury (called History of Punk with Armisen as the Thatcher-loving Ian Rubbish). They took their idea for a whole series of documentary parodies to the network IFC, got fellow SNL alumnus Seth Meyers involved and, after getting the green light, selected their targets. 

Sandy Passage kicked things off, a parody of the beloved 1975 doc Grey Gardens, about two reclusive upper-class women in a crumbling mansion. Along the way they’ve paid homage to The Kid Stays in the Picture, Stop Making Sense, The Artist is Present, Salesman, Nanook of the North and a melding of many Herzog docs. 

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And they’ve convinced the likes of Cate Blanchett (astonishing in their tribute to the 1994 BBC documentary Three Salons at the Seaside, set in Blackpool), to be involved, along with many more including Tom Jones, Michael Keaton, Faye Dunaway and Helen Mirren (who hosts the series).

These shows could only be made with love and a deep abiding knowledge. It would take a true Sondheim fanatic (in this case John Mulaney) to recreate DA Pennebaker’s amazing documentary about the original cast recording of Company (Co-op the Musical, probably my favourite of the series). 

One critic, after witnessing the Three Salons… parody, Two Hairdressers in Bagglyport, claimed it “goes so softly it barely qualifies as parody at times.” The Herzog two-parter, which folds in Grizzly Man, My Best Fiend, Little Dieter Needs to Fly and others, was only missing a cameo from Werner himself to warrant inclusion into the great man’s canon.

And the book of the series continues this obsessive eye, continuing the conceit that the series has been running on PBS since the mid-1970s. It’s slathered with full-colour pictures, the entire score to Co-Op the Musical and even fake copyright notices on the title verso.

It obviously takes so much time, passion and creative effort to put together Documentary Now!, that it feels churlish to simply label it a comedy series. It’s much more than that. I mean, it’s got the word “documentary” right there in the name. Why not celebrate it as that? 

The films on offer are probably as real as the documentaries they try to emulate. I’m sure Werner Herzog would approve of that.

All episodes of Documentary Now! are streaming on ITVX. Documentary Now!: Fourth Edition (Revised and Expanded) is published by McSweeney’s and available now.