"Documentary Now!," the series that specializes in highbrow parodies, returns with another impressive list of celebrity guests, including Cate Blanchett, Alexander Skarsgard, Jonathan Pryce and singer Tom Jones.
But the most important superstars are the ones behind the camera.
Season 4 of the series, which kicks off at 10 p.m. ET Wednesday on IFC, continues to be produced by Seth Meyers, Bill Hader and Fred Armisen, three of the most brilliant — and busiest — comics in the business.
"Often, when I'm on vacation with my wife, she's not super psyched when I tell her I have to go write my 'Documentary Now!' episode," "Late Night" host Meyers said during a virtual news conference last month with TV critics. "It's a totally different style of writing than what I do with my day job."
One gets the sense that the creative team uses the show as an excuse to check in with old friends. Most of the key players worked at "Saturday Night Live" around the same era.
"It's the only way I get to see them," said frequent director Alex Buono, who shot a lot of short films for "SNL" and currently focuses on "Russian Doll." "Every few years I get to hang out with these guys again. It's nice."
Being in demand can make it hard to find time for side projects, however infrequent. Hader's participation in the series has decreased since the launch of his Emmy-winning series "Barry." And there have been long hiatuses between seasons, including a three-and-a-half-year gap between Season 3 and these new episodes.
It's always worth the wait. Since its 2016 debut, the show has routinely churned out smart comedy, especially for those who think Ken Burns is a bigger rock star than Harry Styles.
Past highlights include a spoof of "The War Room," in which Hader and Armisen play sex-obsessed politicos, and John Mulaney's sendup of the "Original Cast Album: Company," featuring the should-be Christmas staple "Holiday Party (Cocaine Tonight)." Blanchett should have won an Emmy for her portrayal as a super-serious performance artist who's the darling of every modern art museum.
"It just occurred to me," Armisen said. "Are we the Weird Al of documentaries?"
Season 4 satirizes six classic docs, including "When We Were Kings" and "The September Issue." "The Monkey Grifter," an episode written by Meyers, features a gullible filmmaker (Jamie Demetriou) who gets conned by a zoo animal all too familiar with the plot of "Strangers on a Train." It was inspired by "My Octopus Teacher."
"One of the fun things about this show is taking documentaries from all different eras and not really worrying about whether it's the most popular documentary that everybody has seen," Buono said. "But it is always nice to have at least one every season that everybody has heard of."
The creative team has yet to hear any complaints from documentary filmmakers, although Meyers had a fascinating discussion with Werner Herzog this past summer when he was a "Late Night" guest.
Meyers explained on-air that "Now" was going to pay tribute to Herzog's "Burden of Dreams," the documentary in which the German director looks back at the challenges of shooting deep in the Peruvian rainforests. In the parody, Skarsgard plays a stubborn director using a mountain village in Russia as the backdrop for a sitcom pilot called "Bachelor Nanny."
"I even brought in pictures to try to show it to him," Meyers said. "He had the perfect Werner Herzog reaction. He went, 'No one will ever match it.'"
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Neal Justin covers the entertainment world, primarily TV and radio, for the Star Tribune.
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