Documentary Now: EW review

Documentary Now!, one of television’s most creative enterprises, can be enjoyed in three ways, and probably more. The premise is narrow – each episode spoofs or pays homage to a classic documentary — yet brilliant execution broadens the appeal. The show is often a cutting satire of cultural storytelling in general, and how all reporting about reality — people, places, ideas – is unreliable at best, distorting fiction at worst. But without fail, the series is a showcase for two of our most versatile comedians and former Saturday Night Live cohorts, Fred Armisen and Bill Hader, and a nerdy brain trust that includes co-creator Seth Meyers and directors Rhys Thomas and Alex Buono.

Season 2 shows every sign of being as inspired and resonant as season 1, which made my 2015 list of TV’s best shows. It launches on Sept. 14 with “The Bunker,” a parody of The War Room, the 1993 Oscar-nominated doc that took people behind the scenes of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign and helped make celebrities out of political operators George Stephanopoulos and James Carville. Written by John Mulaney, “The Bunker” functions as a darkly comic creation myth for post-modern, media-hosted political campaigning, where playing dirty goes beyond mudslinging and scandal-sploitation, but clouding the cultural conversation with truthiness, confabulation, and straight-up liar-liar-pants-on-fire fiction. It takes aim at the whole idea of “political narratives” – the image engineers who promote them, the pundits who parrot and analyze them, and the very idea that we even talk about “political narratives” at all.

Panagoulious and Redbones have literally nothing to sell in Herndon, and that exhilarates them. It gives them a challenge. It also makes the triumph all about them. Their strategy is all about optics and spectacle – not for nothing that the show’s opening shots are a fireworks display – but of the worst possible kind: their focus is solely on tearing down the opponent, framing him as a racist, framing his followers as extremists, whether the frame is true or not. And so “The Bunker” coincidentally intersects with our “basket of deplorables” moment.

But “The Bunker” is really about how our own self-defeating comfort with cynicism and our enjoyment of political theater – with the fireworks display — sets us up for takeover by dangerously unworthy candidates. Here, the curiousness of Armisen portraying Panagoulious as a seducer and the reflexivity of Hader rehashing his Saturday Night Live Carville impression becomes weirdly meaningful. The tricks perpetrated by Panagoulious and Redbones aren’t all that funny, nor are they all that original. They echo — perhaps intentionally — other acidic takes about politics, from the current House of Cards to Tim Robbins’ 1992 mockumentary, Bob Roberts. “The Bunker” confronts us on how much we’ve come to expect – and even be entertained by – the worst in our politics, thanks to a number of factors: politicians that make a mockery of truth and language (see: Bill Clinton and the definition of “is”); non-stop, ratings-driven sports coverage of political contests more interested in strategy than issues; and a steady diet of allegedly savvy political satire. Put another way: I think “The Bunker” is indicting itself, and anything like it.

It also slyly confronts us. “This all started as a bet in a restaurant, a bet that we could get anyone elected to anything,” says Redbones in the final scene. “This was never about the state of Ohio, or Ben Herndon. It’s about what we did. We changed the way election narratives are hijacked. Y’all are now political professionals. You should be proud of that. I’m proud of you. You love your work, and you learned a lot. We all learned a lot.” Hader’s performance is chilly-funny. He plays the speech with such deeply felt appreciation for his workers, you’re almost moved by it. It saves the moment from playing as the words might read on paper – an insult to our intelligence, as if we needed the story to explain its point to us. But this, too, seems to be intentional. His words aren’t a point — they’re a question. What have we gained from revelatory docs like The War Room and biting fiction like “The Bunker?” Do we learn anything from them that changes things for the better? Or do they just teach us to love the fireworks?

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The best thing about the second season of Documentary Now! is that “The Bunker” isn’t even the best episode. I’m not even sure it comes close to what’s coming in the next few weeks. “Parker Gail’s Location is Everything” (episode 3) takes director Jonathan Demme’s Swimming To Cambodia, a 1987 performance film starring the late monologue artist Spalding Gray. Among many things, it plays like a comment on solipsistic, self-documenting culture, subverted by privilege, confabulation and Rashomon reigns, and where everyone becomes characters in someone else’s yarn, and grossly misrepresented, too. With a final twist, the greater whole becomes a spoof of unreliable narrator storytelling and “That’s so meta!” tomfoolery. It’s a nice tonic for a summer of Mr. Robot mind-games. It’s a near one-man show and comic tour de force for Hader, who plays Parker Gail and co-wrote with Mulaney.

And then there’s the heartbreaker that is “Globesmen” (episode 5), a cross-time communion with Salesman, the Maysles brothers classic from 1969 about door-to-door Bible hucksters. Directors Thomas and Buono beautifully simulate the Maysles’ trailblazing direct cinema aesthetic (they wondrously replicate the look and worlds of every docs they assay). “Globesmen,” shot in black and white, recreates a specific moment in time to stunning effect and creates allegory for a certain worldview, a capitalist critique similar to Death of a Salesman, where survival-of-the-fittest competition and adaptation defines human dignity. This is more homage than parody, so much so that when an obvious joke is attempted, it’s a jarring demerit. Hader and Armisen — graying salesmen differing in ability and confidence – create a scene of great power, with one character loving another by hustling a moment of grace, a narrative of hope. Whatever Documentary Now! is selling, I’m buying. A-