Documentary Now!

"Documentary Now!" is an IFC anthology from Bill Hader, Fred Armisen, Seth Meyers, and Rhys Thomas, hosted with mock gravitas by Helen Mirren. Each half-hour is a standalone parody of a specific real documentary or documentary style, recreated shot-for-shot with new characters and a completely fabricated subject. One episode might target "Grey Gardens," the next "Jiro Dreams of Sushi," the next a Vice-style war-zone dispatch. Hader and Armisen play the leads in most episodes; guest casts have included Cate Blanchett, Owen Wilson, Michael Keaton, and John Mulaney.

The craft is the whole point, and the craft is absurd. Rhys Thomas and Alex Buono match the cinematography, film stock, editing rhythms, and title design of whatever they're spoofing so precisely that you can watch an episode without ever having seen the original and still feel the specific texture of that filmmaking era. Hader disappears into voices and faces the way he did on SNL — his old-lady work in the "Grey Gardens" riff is genuinely eerie. Armisen commits to the deadpan even when the joke requires him to sing an entire off-Broadway concept album about a co-op board meeting. The writing, mostly Meyers and John Mulaney, understands that the funniest thing about serious documentaries is how self-serious they are, and it plays that note without ever winking. Cate Blanchett doing performance-art satire in "Waiting for the Artist" is one of the best half-hours of television nobody watched.

It's an inside joke stretched across a series. If you haven't seen the source documentary being parodied, some episodes work as pure absurd character pieces, and some just sit there looking like well-shot nothing. The show also refuses to build — there are no recurring characters, no arcs, no reason to keep watching except that the next one might land. Some episodes are lesser efforts dressed in expensive imitation. And the pace is documentary pace, which means slow on purpose. Anyone hoping for the joke-density of "Portlandia" or "Barry" will find this quiet, dry, and often committed to the bit long past the point of comfort.

People who watch a lot of documentaries, or people who watched SNL for Stefon and Herb Welch and want to see Hader given four days and a real budget. Fans of "Mr. Show," "The Comeback," or Christopher Guest movies will slide right in. If you tapped out of "Portlandia" in season one, you'll tap out here too. Pick the episode whose source you love — the Talking Heads one, the Marina Abramović one, the Wild Country one — and start there.

WORTH IT holds because the execution is the argument. This is a show about how documentaries are made, told by people who studied the form obsessively and then made forty-minute jokes about it. Nothing here is preached; the satire lives entirely in performance and shot choice. When it fails, it fails on execution, not on message. When it works, it's some of the most technically precise comedy on television. It won't rewire your week, but the ceiling is very high and the best episodes are small masterpieces. Worth the shelf space.