Every Episode of Documentary Now!, Ranked From Worst to Best
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
The post Every Episode of Documentary Now!, Ranked From Worst to Best appeared first on Consequence.
Over its four seasons (or, as host Helen Mirren would have you believe, 53) on the air, IFC’s Documentary Now! has taken a methodical and comically genius eye to the art of documentary filmmaking. Creators Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, Rhys Thomas, and Seth Meyers leverage their encyclopedic understanding of the form and its most iconic signposts, building incredible takes on docs both old and new, classic and obscure.
It’s high-minded comedy for film nerds, to be sure (Meyers once described the show as being “for so few people”). Still, the considerable comic talent on display makes each episode a master class in how to emulate the styles of various documentaries over cinema history while injecting just enough absurdism to eke out a laugh.
With the show closing out its fourth season this week, we thought we’d go back over every episode of the show’s run to date and put them in some kind of order — less “best to worst,” more “classic to ‘pretty good, I guess.'” Along the way, we’ll pass through loving homages, blistering dressing-downs of journalistic hubris, and maybe even a musical or two. But throughout the list thrums a pitch-perfect understanding of what makes their subjects work, how to lampoon them, and — best of all — the most interesting way to synthesize the two approaches into something entirely new.
Let’s take a journey, shall we?
23. “Kunuk Uncovered” (Season 1, Episode 2)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: Robert J. Flaherty’s 1922 doc Nanook of the North (more specifically, the 1990 making-of Nanook Revisited)
The crazy thing about ranking Documentary Now! is that each of these episodes is somebody’s favorite. That’s certainly the case for “Kunuk Uncovered,” which is less a riff on the classic silent doc Nanook of the North than its retrospective making-of Nanook Revisited, which clocked the early film’s penchant for staging scenes with its Inuit subject. It’s still brilliant, especially directors Alex Buono and Rhys Thomas’ command of the silent doc format and Armisen’s deadpan depiction of a noble savage type who becomes a preening diva once the cameras come on. All these episodes are good! To my mind, the others are all just a bit better.
22. “My Monkey Grifter” (Season 4, Episode 5)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: 2021’s inexplicable Oscar winner My Octopus Teacher, plus some elements from Koko: A Talking Gorilla.
For anyone who shook their head when the anodyne Netflix doc My Octopus Teacher won the award over more deserving fare (Justice for Garrett Bradley’s Time!), My Monkey Grifter might seem like sweet retribution. The Afterparty‘s Jamie Demetriou is beautifully credulous as a dopey documentary filmmaker who charts his budding relationship with a rhesus macaque, never quite clocking that he’s being taken for a ride. Its descent into con-artist thriller is a lovely gag, but it’s riffing on a doc that doesn’t really give them a lot to work with.
21. “Batshit Valley” (Season 3, Episodes 1 & 2)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: Netflix’s true-crime docuseries Wild Wild Country.
A lot of the lower entries on this list lean toward Doc Now!’s takes on newer documentaries — which makes sense, because there just isn’t as much cultural cachet to riff on. Same goes for their spin on Wild Wild Country, which is a cute enough twist on the cult Netflix docuseries, but ironically suffers for being stretched over two episodes. Owen Wilson and Michael Keaton are a gas, though, as respectively the super-zen cult leader and straight-faced FBI suit tasked with handling him. (Necar Zadegan steals the show as the power behind the throne, though.)
20. “A Town, A Gangster, A Festival” (Season 1, Episode 5)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: Nothing specific, but vaguely riffs on a whole subgenre of docs about quaint small-town customs and festivals.
Again, it feels criminal to put all these episodes so low; “A Town, A Gangster, A Festival” is notable not just because it’s a quaint sendup of the quirkiness of small-town customs, but because it’s the one Doc Now! episode not clearly derived from an existing documentary. Telling the story of an Icelandic town that celebrates the pinstripe suits and casual violence of Al Capone, this one succeeds most mightily with its oddball sense of authenticity.
19. “Long Gone” (Season 3, Episode 6)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: The Chet Baker documentary Let’s Get Lost.
Documentary Now! is no stranger to the ponderous musician profile, but Long Gone largely leans on one major structural joke: that a cool Chet Baker-like musician (Armisen’s jazz guitarist Rex Logan) would actually be a dopey rube whose meandering tunes would become inextricably tied to the movements of an Eastern European dictatorship. That final punchline is great, but apart from some gentle ribs at the presumed genius of male artists (including Natasha Lyonne’s inspired work as Rex’s doe-eyed ex-wife), the show has done this kind of thing better.
18. “How They Threw Rocks” (Season 4, Episode 4)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: The Ali-Foreman sports documentary When We Were Kings.
Just as they do rock gods, Doc Now! often sets its sights on the elevated personalities of sports stars, and the fawning documentaries that follow their exploits. Here, writer Seth Meyers takes aim at the flowery words and bloody blows of When We Were Kings, transplanting the much-publicized “Rumble in the Jungle” between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman to quaint rural Wales, trading boxing gloves for rocks in the country’s annual craig maes.
Trystan Gravelle has a ball as the paunchy, blustering people’s champ Alwyn Lewis-Ifans. But the real laughs come from the dueling game of verbal one-upmanship from John Rhys-Davies and Jonathan Pryce, as feuding sports journos of the day venting spleen about each other as much as the fight.
17. “Globesman” (Season 2, Episode 4)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: The Maysles Brothers’ fly-on-the-wall doc Salesman.
Just like its source material, “Globesman” keeps its tone dour, depressing, and murky, making it all the funnier. Riffing on Albert and David Maysles’ self-funded doc about door-to-door Bible salesmen, Globesman suffuses the journeys of four middle-aged shirt-and-tie salesmen trying to hawk globes to avoidant housewives at $49.95 a pop. What really makes it is Armisen’s down-on-his-luck Tom O’Halloran (nicknamed “The Possum”), who at his lowest moments laments he should have become a fireman like his dad.
16. “DRONEZ: The Hunt for El Chingon” (Season 1, Episode 3)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: Various VICE documentary segments.
There are two kinds of Documentary Now! episodes: Loving homages to docs they love, and searing takedowns of doc formats/styles with deep systemic flaws. “DRONEZ: The Hunt for El Chingon” is one of the latter, prodding at the hipster flippancy and too-slick presentation of Vice’s HBO documentaries.
Hader and Armisen play a successive array of arrogant Brooklynites who swagger into cartel-run territory to track down an infamous drug lord, only to meet horrible fates along the way. Blink and you’ll miss Jack Black as the bearded, T-shirt-wearing Shane Smith type, hammering home just how far these douches will go to get the story.
15. “Any Given Saturday Afternoon” (Season 3, Episode 7)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: The quaint bowling doc A League of Ordinary Gentlemen.
Few mediums like the documentary excel at elevating the ordinary into the extraordinary, a pattern Documentary Now! mimics with incredible alacrity. And so it goes with their pitch-perfect look at the strikes and gutters of a trio of old bowlers grasping at a second chance for relevance in the early 2000s. It’s also notable for the absence of Hader and Armisen (like a lot of Season 3), which gives some guest performers time to shine.
Michael C. Hall gets to channel his Dexter-like blankness into the teasingly robotic bowling star “Dead Eyes” Dempsey, whose skill stymies bowling bad boy Rick Kenmore (Tim Robinson) — a great use of the anarchic physicality he’d later bring to I Think You Should Leave. Meanwhile, Larry Hawburger (Bobby Moynihan) is a homeless schmoe living in his car who’s just happy to be involved.
14. “Two Hairdressers in Bagglyport” (Season 4, Episode 3)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: Three Salons at the Seaside, an observational TV doc about hairdressers from the UK, with some glances at R. J. Cutler’s Vogue magazine doc The September Issue.
Sometimes, Documentary Now! just wants to delight, and that’s certainly the case with this disarming, charming take on the lives and locks of the old women who hobble in and out of a quaint corner hair salon in a small Blackpool village.
Cate Blanchett (not the last time she’ll appear on this list) is practically unrecognizable as the barmy, gap-toothed hairdresser desperate for the approval of the fussy, fastidious owner (Succession‘s Harriet Walter, also brilliant). Casual kidnappings, black widows, the incessant search for the right spread for the shop’s annual “look book” — all of it treated with the shopworn innocence of another foggy English day.
13. “Mr. Runner Up: My Life as an Oscar Bridesmaid” (Season 2, Episodes 6 & 7)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: The blustering Robert Evans documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture.
The source material, the autobiographical doc from Hollywood’s most self-aggrandizing producer (and that’s saying something), hardly needs to be parodied. But John Mulaney and Bill Hader’s incisive but loving takedown of the Tinseltown legend is a whole lot of fun, from Hader’s typically motor-mouthed bravado as Jerry Wallach (for whom Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs ignited his love of cinema…and the fat cash it can rake in at movie houses) to the straight-faced celebrity cameos from Mia Farrow, Faye Dunaway, and Peter Bogdanovich. (“I made a bet with Jerry that ‘Friend of the Son of Man’ would not recoup,” Bodganovich tells us. “If he won, I had to wear a bandana around my neck every day for 50 years. And here we are.”)
12. “Trouver Frisson” (Season 4, Episode 6)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: Any number of quirky, tres French self-reflective docs from Agnes Varda, most notably My Gleaners & I and The Beaches of Agnes.
French New Wave luminary Agnes Varda finally gets the Doc Now! treatment in this most recent season finale, a deeply affectionate take on the quirky Grande Dame of French cinema and her offbeat, self-reflective documentaries.
Liliane Rovère (Call My Agent!) stars as Varda-like Ida Leos, who talks to experts and friends alike about the nature of “frisson” and why she no longer experiences it. When it dips into her past with a standoffish, Godard-like filmmaker (Ronald Guttman), complete with pitch-perfect odes to 1964’s Bande à part, it’s a real treat for fans of the nouvelle vague. And its deceptively uplifting ending is a great way to close out the season.
11. “The Eye Doesn’t Lie” (Season 1, Episode 4)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: The Rosetta Stone of true-crime documentaries, Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line.
What if an innocent man was sentenced to death for a crime he didn’t commit…. but you didn’t mind, because god he’s so annoying? That’s the central pull of The Eye Doesn’t Lie, one of the show’s best early efforts. Affecting the starkness of Morris’ revolutionary presentation — reenactments, nimbly-edited talking head segments — for a tale about a murdered sign spinner, the very clearly guilty hitchhiker (Bill Hader) who did it, and the irritating rube (Armisen) who just won’t stop chewing on his trail mix.
The same tricks Morris used to build suspense become buttons on the episode’s most absurd talking points: an inflatable tube man dancing in the pitch-black night, creamsicles falling from cop’s hands, all with the gravitas of a capital crime.
10. “Parker Gail’s Location is Everything” (Season 2, Episode 3)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: Spalding Gray’s stream-of-consciousness monologue film Swimming to Cambodia, by Jonathan Demme.
A broad swath of Documentary Now! leans hard on Bill Hader’s unstoppable comic chops, and he’s never better than this one-man impersonation of the addlepated patter of spoken-word titan Spalding Gray. Free associating his way through a half hour of bromides and monologues about the concept of ‘home,’ Hader’s Gail lays bare his multiple failures: his egotism, easily distracted nature, and the hubris of imagining everyone’s interested in what he has to say.
It also nails the black-box intimacy of Demme’s approach to Swimming to Cambodia, from its use of quaint props to that table that just won’t stop wobbling. (Cue the “Polite Laughter” sign.)
09. “Gentle & Soft: The Story of the Blue Jean Committee” (Season 1, Episodes 6 & 7)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: The Alex Gibney-produced Eagles documentary History of the Eagles.
Haim loves them; Cameron Crowe can’t get enough of them. Chuck Klosterman calls their album, Catalina Breeze, “the quintessential California record.” Such begins the odyssey of The Blue Jean Committee, a rock group from Chicago who pivot from grungy Chicago blues to meringue-light soft rock because it’ll sell better in the ’70s (according to industry hotshot producer Alvin Izoff, played by the Eagles’ real manager Irving Alzoff).
It’s a great two-parter, one whose absurdity sneaks up on you from the get rather than building to one big punchline. And its central rivalry between hotheads Gene (Armisen) and Clark (Hader), whose directions for the band echo their rapidly splitting lives and careers, is enough to make you tear up amongst the laughs.
08. “Searching for Mr. Larson: A Love Letter From the Far Side” (Season 3, Episode 5)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: Dear Mr. Watterson, and other lo-fi crowdfunded documentaries of a similar stripe.
One of the show’s most successful lampoons comes from one of its easiest targets: the rise of the crowdfunded niche documentary, often by a superfan desperate to validate his own nerdy obsessions at the cost of his life and dignity. Hader and Duffy Boudreau’s script takes incisive aim at an entire generation of manchildren, as Armisen’s director-cum-subject bounds from one clueless stop after another to look for the reclusive cartoonist responsible for The Far Side (who never consented to be interviewed for the doc, mind).
From accosting random strangers to ask them about a comic strip they don’t care about, to the increasingly desperate calls from his pregnant wife to come home, the episode layers one brilliant level of cringe comedy on top of the other. It’s one of my very favorites.
07. “Juan Likes Rice & Chicken” (Season 2, Episode 2)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: The sumptuous sushi doc Jiro Dreams of Sushi.
Where Jiro Dreams of Sushi treated the exotic, detail-oriented world of sushi preparation with infinite complexity and pathos, “Juan Likes Rice & Chicken” does the same…. to a simple bowl of rice with chicken. It’s an elegant, incredible take on the mannered, pristine formulas of culinary docs, with the kind of luxuriant panning over expertly-prepared dishes we’d soon grow familiar with in things like Chef’s Table.
This time, though, Buono and Thomas use those techniques to elevate Juan’s exceedingly humble food to absurdly inflated degrees — right down to self-satisfied praise from pompous food critics (including Bill Hader’s Cuban food critic, one of his funniest character voices to date). But its tale of a family that learns to love each other, even when one of your sons would rather go into improv than continue your culinary dynasty, makes it as heartwarming as it is hilarious.
06. “Final Transmission” (Season 2, Episode 5)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: Jonathan Demme’s show-stopping concert doc for The Talking Heads, Stop Making Sense. (Also a one-scene homage to the Tom Waits concert doc Big Time.)
The Doc Now! folks love Demme, a filmmaker who isn’t entirely known for his documentaries. But “Final Transmission” is one of the show’s best takes on his approach, an oddball concert film emulating the affected strangeness of David Byrne and The Talking Heads during their revolutionary opus Stop Making Sense.
Filmed as a real live concert (Armisen, Hader, Maya Rudolph and the rest put on an actual show in San Gabriel, California), “Final Transmission” is at once a testament to Armisen and Hader’s musical chops — the songs actually slap, even in their understated art-project pretensions — and their deep-bench knowledge of the conventions of the music doc. Come for Armisen’s spacey take on David Byrne’s alien-like commitment to creativity, stay for Rudolph’s show-stopping ballad “Save Time for Me” (which we all know from the soundtrack to the hit ’80s blockbuster, Sun Warriors).
05. “Soldier of Illusion” (Season 4, Episodes 1 & 2)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: Werner Herzog’s existential, surreal documentaries, most notably the Les Blank-directed Empire of Dreams, about the making of his historical epic Fitzcarraldo.
It would have been easy for Documentary Now! and writer John Mulaney to do a straightforward pastiche of Empire of Dreams, make Bill Hader do a hokey Werner Herzog impression, and call it a day. But what makes “Soldier of Illusion” so brilliant is the ways it dodges those expectations while building its own comic infrastructure one gut-busting brick at a time.
Alexander Skarsgård’s Rainer Wolz isn’t quite doing a Herzog voice, but he captures that intensity, the precision, the dogged desire to put himself and others at risk for the sake of art. But John Mulaney’s script throws in the most surprising of monkey wrenches: He’s not only documenting the lives of an impoverished tribe of people in Russia, he’s simultaneously producing the pilot for a CBS sitcom called Bachelor Nanny. And of course, he directs a hokey three-camera farce with the same intensity as he would any of his hard-hitting meditations on life, right down to calling up his unstable ringer (August Diehl’s Dieter Diemler, nailing the volatility of Klaus Kinski). A masterclass in elevating the inside-baseball film nerd nature of the premise into something universally hilarious.
04. “Sandy Passage” (Season 1, Episode 1)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: The Maysles Brothers’ classic doc Grey Gardens. Also, Paranormal Activity?
Documentary Now!‘s first crack at the documentary parody is also one of its most expertly handled, a riff on the Maysles’ Grey Gardens that practically requires a working knowledge of the documentary to make it work. And yet, Hader and Armisen’s impressions of Big Edie and Little Edie are the stuff of legend, from Hader wrapping a pair of pants around her head as a scarf to dropping straight through the floor of the crumbling mansion they call home.
But it’s the ultimate punchline that makes this one sing, as Big and Little Vivvy (as they’re known here) suddenly turn the voyeurism of the camera crew back on their heads, chasing them through the house for some Blair Witch-style scares. It was a brilliant portent for the show to come.
03. “Waiting for the Artist” (Season 3, Episode 4)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: Matthew Aker’s performance art profile Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present.
Conversely, you don’t need to have seen The Artist is Present to wrap your head around this one, as Blanchett throws herself into the role of an aloof, impenetrable performance artist named Izabella Barta. (She and Lydia Tár would have been friends, I think.)
Seth Meyers’ script captures the insular world of the avant-garde, from its phalanx of doe-eyed students eager to learn from the masters to the history of increasingly silly performance art pieces Barta has attempted (“I am human!” she growls under a fur coat, licking milk next to a cat). And it builds up to a lovely catharsis, the frequently-underestimated Barta having the last laugh against her lazy, hanger-on ex Dimo (Armisen), who coasts off her fame without wanting to put in the work.
02. “The Bunker” (Season 2, Episode 1)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: Chris Hegedus and D.A. Pennebaker’s Clinton-era political barnstorner The War Room.
“We changed the way election narratives are hijacked.” It’s nerve-wracking to write this piece on the eve of the 2022 midterms, where democracy seems to hang by a thread. But it’s comforting to know we were always headed down this path, as Season 2’s “The Bunker” informs us.
Translating the Bill Clinton gubernatorial campaign into a low-stakes local race headed by two too-tenacious political operators (Bill Hader’s James Carville-like Teddy Redbones, The “Mississippi Machiavelli,” and Armisen’s boyish Alvin Panagoulis, the “boy-hunk of the Beltway”), “The Bunker” slices deep at the cutthroat nature of political campaigns, like figuring out just how thinly to disguise a death threat in an attack ad. If anything, their 1990s maneuvering feels quaint now, but it remains a deeply effective spin on a pivotal moment in political narrative-building.
01. “Original Cast Album: Co-Op” (Season 3, Episode 3)
Documentary Now! (IFC)
It’s a Parody Of: D.A. Pennebaker’s fly-on-the-wall glimpse of Sondheim musical magic: Original Cast Album: Company.
The brown and the beige and the brown and the beige and the broooown! Let’s face it, there was never going to be any other number one than this, the John Mulaney and Seth Meyers-penned parody of D.A. Pennebaker’s seminal doc about the recording of the original cast album for Stephen Sondheim’s classic musical. And in so doing, they (and songwriter Eli Bolin) throw together a killer songbook of Sondheim soundalikes, centered around this fictional play about the lives and loves of the residents of a New York apartment building. (The show, by the way, closes the night of the album’s recording due to poor reviews.)
Mulaney captures the tyrannical fastidiousness of his Sondheim analogue (see how he stresses the way Renee Elise Goldsberry pronounces “ruined”), Richard Kind blusters as a breath-challenged actor saddled with a lengthy patter song, and Paula Pell shouts and threatens her way through an Elaine Stritch-level tantrum as she struggles to finish a song before she gets her “eyeballs scraped.”
It’s a celebration of the groovy buzz of the original documentary, Sondheim’s music, and New York theater in general; for all these reasons and more, it tops our list.
Documentary Now! is currently streaming on AMC+.
Every Episode of Documentary Now!, Ranked From Worst to Best
Clint Worthington
Popular Posts
Rick Ross Denies Being Hoarder While Showing Off Mansion Filled with Clothes and Shoes
Eminem Celebrates Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Induction: "I'm Probably Not Supposed to Be Here"
Joe Walsh on Honoring Taylor Hawkins, Reuniting James Gang, and Learning From Pete Townshend
Hozier on His New Song for God of War: Ragnarök, "Blood Upon the Snow": Exclusive
