On an atypically sunny morning in April, an octogenarian actor rested her eyes on a black leather-based sofa in an Airbnb in Blackpool, a seaside city on England’s northwestern coast recognized for its risqué postcards and dilapidated Victorian grandeur. The home, whose aesthetic fell someplace between canary-yellow cheer and acid comedown, was the truth is stuffed with grandmotherly ladies, immaculately groomed, swaddled in beige knits, consuming tea and ready for his or her close-ups. Much less soigné amongst them was the film star Cate Blanchett, who wore prosthetic buckteeth, a permed orange wig, chunky plastic spectacles, and a pink nylon apron. “You actually look completely unrecognizable,” her co-star, the actor Harriet Walter, instructed her. “Thanks,” Blanchett replied, deadpan.

The double Oscar winner—closely tipped to win a 3rd Academy Award subsequent spring for her ferocious performance as a conductor in Tár—was taking the day’s work severely, or as severely as you may take an absurdist homage to a 1994 BBC documentary about hairdressers known as Three Salons on the Seaside. She was there as a result of she’s one of many individuals who has purchased into the imaginative and prescient of Documentary Now!, the recondite ardour venture dreamed up by a squad of Saturday Evening Stay veterans nearly 10 years in the past. The sequence quantities to a long-running in-joke amongst associates: It’s an earnestly loving tribute to movie historical past and an everyday reunion for individuals whose schedules are stuffed with obligations equivalent to embarking on world comedy excursions, internet hosting late-night discuss reveals, and dealing on Marvel TV spin-offs. “I’m actually glad that everyone else enjoys it,” Alex Buono, one of many present’s administrators, instructed me. “I really feel prefer it’s a present that we make for ourselves to amuse one another.”

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There are two exceptional issues about Documentary Now! One is that it really works in any respect—{that a} sequence whose goal blends comedic parody and genuine tribute doesn’t get misplaced in esotericism. The opposite is that, because of the ability and status of its inventive group (which incorporates Seth Meyers, Fred Armisen, John Mulaney, Buono, and the director Rhys Thomas), it’s in all probability TV’s final really unbothered present. All people does what they need, and we, the viewers, get to see what oddball, magical artwork that sort of inventive freedom can manifest—such because the sight of Blanchett, mousy and muted, furiously yanking a brush by way of an aged girl’s hair.

“There’s not an oz. of preciousness in it, you already know?” Blanchett instructed me between takes. “And it’s so buoyant. Usually, you will get so slowed down attempting to excellent issues. The deliberate imperfection on this sequence is actually nice.” She was additionally struck by the care that Meyers, who wrote the episode, had for the supply materials: “It was superb how a lot Seth understood the language and the environment of [Three Salons], being an American man describing the aged feminine expertise in 1994.” (After I relayed this to Meyers later, he mentioned it was the “highest doable reward” he may think about.) The sequence could be comedy, however it’s sincerely dedicated to documentary and to the factor that documentary captures higher than another artwork kind: the extravagant, fascinating spectacle of humankind.

If the brand new season of Documentary Now! has a theme, it’s ardour tasks extra typically—bewildering, uncompromising schemes dreamed up by bewildering, uncompromising individuals. In a two-part episode, Alexander Skarsgård performs a director named Rainer Wolz (a calmly fictionalized Werner Herzog), who has a regal bearing, an absurd German accent, and a plan to make use of a visit capturing Indigenous communities in a desolate area in Russia to additionally in some way direct a CBS sitcom known as Bachelor Nanny. (The episode is basically based mostly on Herzog’s documentary Burden of Goals.) One other pays tribute to the French New Wave director Agnès Varda and her movies The Seashores of Agnès and Faces Locations, during which she revisited her life by way of a sort of cinematic scrapbooking. There’s one impressed by the Oscar-winning boxing documentary When We Have been Kings that follows a legend within the (fictional) Welsh sport of rock throwing. And there’s a parody of the Oscar-winning documentary My Octopus Trainer known as My Monkey Grifter that additionally manages to wink on the conventions of morally doubtful true-crime sequence.

In every episode, dedication to a conceit is matched by visible verisimilitude: the precise graininess of footage, the nuances of language, even the non secular vibe of a scene. When the creators first dreamed up the sequence, Armisen instructed me, “we would have had completely different concepts of it. For me, it was that I needed [the episodes] to be convincing. That somebody may watch it and say, ‘I believe that is actual.’ Even that individuals may have arguments about it.” (Once we spoke, he was sporting a David Lee Roth–esque wig and a starchy blue uniform for his small however very important function because the hair salon’s postman, George.)

The thought to pay tribute to Three Salons on the Seaside, a documentary so obscure it appears to exist solely in a fuzzy and sure unlawful YouTube recording, got here from Blanchett. She made her Documentary Now! debut in Season 3, taking part in a efficiency artist (based mostly on Marina Abramović) whose profession included working by way of a gallery with a bucket on her head and yowling like a cat. (The episode, with its shrewdness and jubilant ending, is among the most memorable items of tv I’ve ever seen.) Whereas filming the present Mrs. America, during which she performed the conservative firebrand Phyllis Schlafly, Blanchett spent important quantities of time having her hair styled into Schlafly’s immutable waves. Her stylist really helpful Three Salons throughout a dialogue about what hair salons can imply to ladies—how they could be a place of refuge, a group middle, a locus of care. “Despite the fact that it’s set in Blackpool and I’m from Melbourne, watching it felt like stepping again into my childhood,” Blanchett mentioned. “As a result of my grandmother lived with us, and I spent my total childhood in [the hair salon] Ezio of Rome”—she pronounced it so emphatically that everybody else within the room fell into giggles—“round all these aged ladies. Between there and the croquet membership. I simply completely fell in love with it.”

For the ensuing “Two Hairdressers in Bagglyport,” Meyers determined to mix the salon idea with The September Concern, R. J. Cutler’s chronicle of Vogue and the loaded relationship between the journal’s longtime editor in chief, Anna Wintour, and its former inventive director, Grace Coddington. Harriet Walter performs Edwina, the stainless proprietor of Salon de Edwina, and Blanchett is Alice, a form however clumsy helpmeet who goes to work for Edwina after her bricklayer husband is killed by a falling pile of bricks. The jokes abide—Edwina, ordering a sandwich, is given choices of “butter and pickle, tomato mayonnaise, and ham with vinegar,” and a group jar is handed round for somebody named Mary, who’s “been kidnapped. Once more.”

As with different Documentary Now! episodes, although, the precision with which “Two Hairdressers” emulates its supply materials is notable, right down to filming in one of many authentic areas, a near-identical rating, similar photographs of hair being wound onto rollers, and matching B-roll of a curler skater loudly rattling down the road. “The unique has acquired such a candy tone to it; it’s a really harmless, humorous factor,” Walter instructed me. “I used to be fearful that we’d be type of sending it up, or a bit patronizing or one thing.” A special present might need. However Three Salons on the Seaside (directed by Philippa Lowthorpe, who later gained a BAFTA for her work on Name the Midwife) is intent on portraying the dignity of its topics amid problem, and Documentary Now! was simply as intent on doing the identical.

Later that afternoon, I watched Walter shoot a scene during which Edwina talks in regards to the salon’s significance. “These ladies have all had laborious lives,” she mentioned, her forehead furrowed. “And that is the place the place we’re speculated to make it a bit of higher for them.” Walters ran by way of the scene a number of instances; she prompt utilizing the phrase women as a substitute of ladies, to evoke extra intimacy. (Women did certainly make it into the ultimate minimize.) “For us, a minimum of,” Rhys Thomas instructed me, “you actually do neglect the viewers. In a enjoyable manner. That’s the great thing about documentaries too, that they’re actual life.” The second the present begins attempting to lean away from “fact” and towards comedy, he thinks, is the second it falls aside. However it hasn’t but.