We all currently live in a world where Bill Hader and Fred Armisen are allowed to take their obsessive love of documentaries and go absolutely mental with it all over their very own TV series. And for that, we are all the richer.
If you haven’t gotten eyes across the insanely brilliant IFC series ‘Documentary Now!,’ then your weekend viewing just got sorted out.
The series is an absurdly weird, incredibly specific pisstake of documentary films, with each episode lampooning a different doco to the nth degree. The sheer amount of work, attention to detail, and note-perfect imitation is truly something to behold.
And this is just about as good an example of that as you’re ever likely to see. The show aired its ‘Final Transmission‘ episode a couple of days ago, which took aim at the phenomenally brilliant Talking Heads 1984 documentary ‘Stop Making Sense.’
The ‘Documentary Now!‘ version saw Hader and Armisen form the fictional 80s art rock band Test Pattern, with Armisen filling the role of the David Byrne-ish character Lee Smith.
And because if you’re gonna do something you might as well do it at maximum, the pair went ahead and wrote and recorded an entire album to go with the 21 minute episode. Which is precisely the kind of thing you can do when you’re operating at god-levels of nerdism.
What’s more, it’s good. Like, really, really good.
Talking Heads as a band are absolutely not going to make any new music any time soon (or ever). But this is about as close as you’ll ever get. It’s a pitch-perfect homage to the group, with Armisen in particular more or less showing off how good he is at music.
There’s even some real sly-nod artwork accompanying the album, fer pete’s sake.
The songs of a generation.
Listen to Test Pattern’s epic art rock album, ‘Final Transmission.’ https://t.co/dfkJApo5ah pic.twitter.com/T1HYC8kRMz
— Documentary Now! (@DocumentaryNow) October 13, 2016
But it’s the album in full that’s the real winner.
We can’t stress it enough, it’s GREAT.
The episode is just as good too. Well worth your time.
Armisen and Hader can barely do no wrong these days, and we are all reaping the hilarious benefits.
Source: IFC.
Photo: Late Night with Seth Meyers/NBC Universal.
