“Are we the Weird Al of documentaries?”, Fred Armisen asked the TCA panel he was on to promote the upcoming season of Documentary Now!, premiering October 19th on IFC and streaming on AMC+. The joke was prompted by the fact that the team no longer has to explain what the show is when reaching out to documentary filmmakers before comedically twisting their material, or A-List talent when casting each episode. As both an executive producer and star of the series, Armisen shed some light on how each season comes together. “It’s one writer session in the very beginning just to check in with each other, see what we should write about. Then months of emails, and then we start heading a certain direction, and then, all of sudden, what happened this year was there was this new development that we’re going to shoot in England, in Britain. So we had to engineer everything so that it fit shooting there.”
(Will Robson-Scott/Broadway Video/IFC/AMC)
Depending on the source, the upcoming season is either number 4 or 53 and while there are differing opinions, what can be said without question is that the season opener is called “Soldier of Illusion,” written by John Mulaney. “It’s our homage to Burden of Dreams and Aguirre, Wrath of God, and it’s a little bit of a Herzog greatest hits,” revealed executive producer and director Rhys Thomas. “It involves a heavy production taking place in a hostile landscape that we suddenly realized as we were doing it, we actually had to do that as well.” The episode features guest star Alexander Skarsgård. “We reached out and we made an insane request that he come to North Wales to play Herzog, and it didn’t take a ton of convincing. It blew my mind every day waking up in a small, little Hilton in North Wales to find Alexander Skarsgård waiting in the lobby for his van to take him to his miserable, little mine.”
Another highlight this season is an episode titled “My Monkey Grifter,” inspired by the recent Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Teacher. “We're really amused at the idea of taking on a documentary that had just won the Oscar,” mused director and executive producer Alex Buono. “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. But it is always nice to have at least one every season where we feel comfortable that, well, this was really popular on Netflix. It did win the Oscar. At least one of them will be something that everybody's heard of.”
(Will Robson-Scott/Broadway Video/IFC/AMC)
Although there was a three-and-a-half-year break between seasons, largely due to the global pandemic, executive producer and writer Seth Meyers has no fear that Season 4 (or 53) of Documentary Now! will instantly pull back its audience. “It’s so great to make a show that I feel ages well, because it’s already wildly out of date when you make it. You know, when you’re doing a parody of Company, it’s not like that is fresher in 2019 than it’s going to be ten years later.” Not even the real Werner Herzog could convince Seth Meyers otherwise. “Werner Herzog was on my show, and I tried to explain to him that we had done an episode based on his work. And I even brought pictures to try to show it to him, and it was the perfect Werner Herzog reaction, where I said we're trying to recreate the documentary about filming Wrath of God. And he went, ‘No one will ever watch that,’ which was perfect.”
Will nobody watch? Will you? Season 4 (or 53) of Documentary Now! Debuts on Wednesday, October 19th at 7/6c. AMC+ subscribers can be the first to see the first three episodes of the new season streaming that same day.