IFC’s new comedy series Documentary Now! opens by reminding us of all the great documentaries that came in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s. It’s even introduced by Helen Mirren, lending her considerable gravitas to the proceedings – setting the stage for a Very Important Show. Then, thanks to the considerable comic talents of Bill Hader and Fred Armisen, it expectedly transforms into a spoof of everything we’ve seen thus far. It’s kind of like watching five year olds remaking Tootsie with a camcorder. They basically take a massive dump on greatness before them.
The pilot episode, “Sandy Passage,” parodies the great Grey Gardens, a 1975 doc chronicling two near-shut in women (the aunt and cousin of Jackie Onassis) as they live and bicker in the crumbling titular mansion. Hader and Armisen tackle the pair with Hader as Little Vivvy, the meatier role, and Armisen as her mother, Big Vivvy. As in the original film, Hader models his homemade fashions and dances around the crumbling house, at one point falling through the floor onto the kitchen table beneath. To find any of this funny, you have to know Grey Gardens by heart. Sure, the most popular scenes are all here – the costume of the day, the impromptu tap dance, etc – but they’re only funny if you know how closely they mimic the original. Having only seen the film once, even I have a sense that the filmmakers and actors dug deeply into the original material and recreated it even more slavishly than I realize.
Which lead me to wonder: why is it funny merely recreating the original in drag? Sure, Hader is great, throwing himself into the role of Little Vivvy with relish. Yet, after the initial amusement, the concept begins to wear thin at the halfway mark. That’s when the smart team of comics and writers decided to shift the material in a completely different direction. Chances are, you already know what it is, but I’m not going to spoil it for you. Let’s just say we end “Sandy Passage” in a vastly different place than we started, opening up the material to breathe a little rather than continuing to suffocate with mimicry.
So, what to make of Documentary Now!? Its success depends entirely on your familiarity with the source material, I suspect. The real test for me will be the second episode as it parodies HBO’s VICE series of investigative docs, which I’ve never seen. Until then, much like last year’s Spoils of Babylon, Documentary Now! is an in-joke oddity that spawns mild interest. I’m glad it exists, though, as an outlet for talented comics to try something different – even if it it borders on the incredibly self indulgent.