IFC’s Documentary Now! was one of the pop-culture delights of 2015, with Fred Armisen, Seth Meyers, and Bill Hader releasing seven meticulously crafted love letters to the history of documentary film. The show is returning for its “51st” season on September 14, complete with more gentle parodies and Helen Mirren-hosted bumpers. Now, IFC has released a full trailer for the season, giving us our first tease of the six new faux-films on display.
As with last year, the variety is pretty extreme, from “The Bunker”—a riff on 1993’s classic political battler The War Room—to “Globesman,” about a team of hustling, desperate salesmen hounded at every step by the jackals of Big Atlas. We also get a couple of shots of the show’s versions of Stop Making Sense and Spalding Grey’s Swimming To Cambodia, with Armisen as a David Byrne stand-in and Hader in the role of the late monologist. As ever, the production values look basically perfect—they shot the Jiro Dreams Of Sushi parody “Juan Likes Chicken And Rice” on location in Colombia, apparently—and Armisen and Hader look game as ever to lose themselves in the mindsets of their semi-deranged subjects.