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The third season of IFCs obsessive comedy seriesDocumentary Now!is filled with grace notes.
Are we watching family history repeat itself, the father enabling and ruining the son?
Nobody mentions the heros mother.
Did she leave when Bradley was a boy, after enduring shenanigans like the ones pictured here?
When you look back on the best ofDocumentary Now!, its the characters you remember.
You marvel at the technique, yet the characters are not paper targets.
They have a pulse.
They feel disappointment and pain.
You see yourselves in them.
(By the end, he seems as great an innovator as D.W.
The series takes care to get microscopic aesthetic details right, sacrificing them only in favor of jokes.
Some of the touches go beyond period-accuracy and intoMad Men-style cultural anthropology.
Even more meticulous is Original Cast Album: Co-Op, a spoof of D.A.
Pennebakers 1970Original Cast Album: Company, about the recording of Stephen Sondheims classic.
Its in service to emotional content that creeps up on youat times affecting you as a real documentary might.
Its a textbook example of The Show Must Go On.
