Documentary Now! gets very mean (and very funny) with its take on My Octopus Teacher

Documentary Now! has never tackled a nature documentary before, for the pretty straightforward reason that the animals such films focus on lack the wide array of failings, weaknesses, and idiocies that the show so frequently mines for comedy. What a gift My Octopus Teacher must have been for this team, then: An animal documentary that more often than not puts people first, Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed’s 2020 Netflix Original filters its undeniably gorgeous footage of life in a South African kelp forest through the mind of very earnest naturalist Craig Foster, and his clear need to translate the wonders and cruelties of nature into workable life lessons for himself. Foster comes off as a benign figure, in the wash, but that tendency toward self-seriousness, self-obsession, and an occasional weakness for anthropomorphizing his inhuman subjects? Yeah, Documentary Now! can work with that.

And work it does, producing the funniest episode of the season since the Herzog pastiche back at the start. And a key reason for that is because “My Monkey Grifter,” penned once again by Seth Meyers, isn’t afraid to play a little rough with its subject. Benjamin Clay, the hyper-credulous dim bulb at the center of tonight’s story, is a much worse person than Craig Foster, allowing his obsession with a rhesus monkey named Lulu to take him to both darker and dumber places than Foster’s daily sojourns into the water ever did. But Clay (played with a winning lack of both guile and self-awareness by Jamie Demetriou) is ultimately driven by a comically extreme version of the same desire for connection that seems to drive Foster. And while I generally appreciate the gentleness with which Doc Now! typically treats its subjects, it’s refreshing to see Meyers and Demetriou do a little genuine skewering for once.

If there’s a weakness to the episode, then, it’s in a spot that the show typically excels: The style, and the look, of the parody at its core. To be fair to director Alex Buono (flying solo for the first time this season), he obviously doesn’t have years worth of gorgeous wildlife footage to fall back on to mimic the look of Ehrlich and Reed’s film. But what’s left in the gaps leaves “My Monkey Grifter” feeling a little lacking in the show’s usually rigorous specificity, instead ultimately looking like any number of modern documentaries—the hyper-close-ups, the on-screen text, the actor recreations—rather than the incredible formal exercise in imitation this show can sometimes be. (If the idea here was to lift elements from true crime docs as the episode’s con-artist storyline develops, the effort feels a little muddled.)

Luckily, the humor is here, in abundance, to shore up any mild deficiencies in the look. Demetriou, as Clay, is both the face and the voice of the entire episode, and he makes for a compelling sort of fool, the kind of man who convincingly works out the scam he’s trapped in only once he’s about three-quarters of the way through describing the situation to someone else. As we meet him, he’s just become a public laughingstock for directing a film about a man who claims—evidence unseen—to be able to speak to birds. Potential redemption, both for his reputation, and his relationship with the unapproving family who’d bankrolled his folly, comes in the form of an invitation to study zoo monkey Lulu, investigating claims that the primate has learned enough sign language to carry on a conversation with a human being.

What follows is another admirable example of Documentary Now!’s refusal to stop at the first funny idea that might pop into anyone’s mind when deciding on an avenue of parody. It would be funny enough if Clay simply deluded himself into believing that a monkey’s random arm movements were an attempt at communication, existing entirely in his meaning-starved mind. But it’s so much funnier when, after weeks of building rapport, Lulu passes her patsy a picture of a troublesome zookeeper she wants eliminated, and you realize that she does speak English… and is using it to set up Clay as her fall guy, Hitchcock-style, for a series of elaborate crimes.

Everything else rolls downhill from that moment, as the would-be documentarian becomes a suspected murderer, and then a verified art thief. “My Monkey Grifter” pulls the trick, so important in any kind of con story, of embedding us thoroughly enough in Clay’s self-delusions that we don’t always see the trap closing; easy enough to predict that Fred Armisen’s cop might be faking something, but the reveal that the entire zoo was a fabrication is an incredibly funny turn—all capped off with one last slow, drive-by sign (“Wanker”) from Lulu. Documentary Now! frequently embeds itself in a world where things and people are fundamentally okay, so having an occasional episode like this, where a dummy is taken by a bunch of genuinely bad people in a dark and absurd way, is a genuinely nice-nasty change of pace. And it does it all by exaggerating the more eye-roll-y bits of Octopus Teacher, grounding the entire thing in that film’s more emotionally silly moments and blowing them all, delightfully, and completely, out of proportion.

Stray observations

• Tonight, in shit they make Helen Mirren say: “If a dog is a man’s best friend, then what is a monkey?”
• “She hung up without a word. But I knew she’d been there! Because I could hear her sighing.”
• Amazingly, what wildlife footage that is here—chiefly Lulu—does achieve that thing where we can’t help but look for human feeling in an animal’s face.
• Clay’s map of Lulu’s movements looks to be a direct reference to the map Foster draws while trying to track down his octopus during the doc.
• Clay gifts Lulu a lighter that had been a gift from his wife “In simpler times, before she’d become so impossibly difficult.”
• Demetriou gives some great spin on the line where he mourns being kicked out of his apartment, “Which was devastating…because that’s where I’d set up my monkey board.”
• Armisen is quietly effective as Detective Inspector Blakely.
• “It wasn’t clear to me how I had changed, only that it had happened deep inside of me. …Yes.”
• “If I learned anything from my time with Lulu, it was this: ‘Never trust a fucking monkey.’”
• Clay, as one more shoe drops during the closing credits: “Oh, shit. …Shit.”
• And that’s a wrap, folks: Back next week for the season finale, the Agnès Varda-riffing “Trouver Frisson.”