Its Stonehenge may only have been 18in tall but This is Spinal Tap is monumental, casting a long, none-more-black shadow over the mockumentary form. More than three decades on, it remains a masterful study of self-deluded blowhards convinced of their inherent majesty. But by also skewering the pit-stop road rhythms of the rockumentary, the movie’s meta was as heavy as its metal. It acknowledged the parasitical nature of its chosen genre because for your mockumentary to really sing, it helps to spoof something that has already accrued plenty of recognisable signifiers, familiar elements to play up to or against.
The unexpected but apparently unstoppable explosion in long-form true crime investigations – from the rough-justice podcast Serial to HBO’s killer nailbiter The Jinx – has pulled the genre up from its lurid roots and popularised a loftier, more austere tone. Where once true crime programming suggested kitchen knives spilling ketchup in wobbly reconstructions, the popular focus has now shifted to forensic analysis, seeking justice by walking the viewer patiently through a maze of evidence using data visualisation techniques to help construct a convincing case.
It was only a matter of time before someone held up a cracked mirror to serious-minded deep-dive crime series like Netflix’s Making A Murderer and The Keepers, and credit where it’s due: by giving the green light to American Vandal, Netflix happily handed creators Dan Perrault and Tony Yacenda the freedom to undercut some of its most popular original programming. The streaming service even stumped up enough cash to ensure that this eight-episode investigation into a miscarriage of justice – school prankster Dylan being suspended for allegedly spraying graffiti penises on all 27 cars in the faculty car park – would have the same cumulative, multi-part heft of the best true crime big-hitters.
American Vandal’s secret weapon – apart from Jimmy Tatro, who plays Dylan as a biddable dimbulb with the ground-trembling voice of Vin Diesel – is the way Perrault and Yacenda mimic both the sleek, gimmicky infographics of nu-true crime but also interpolate the messy mixed-media bombardment of life at your average high school, from Instagram posts and YouTube videos to poorly shot smartphone footage and misspelled instant messaging. It all feels surprisingly, tangibly real and helps extend what is essentially a playground dick joke into a JFK-style, hall-of-mirrors investigative four-hour epic.
The exactness of your spoof can sometimes backfire. The ongoing IFC series Documentary Now! is essentially a wide-ranging anthology where SNL veterans Bill Hader and Fred Armisen mimic existing documentaries with such verisimilitude, it can feel like you might be missing half the gags if you have yet to see Errol Morris’s classic The Thin Blue Line or foodie sensation Jiro Dreams of Sushi. Fellow SNL star Andy Samberg has, between series of Brooklyn Nine-Nine, taken a rather more scattershot approach, assembling star-studded casts for daft sports mockumentary one-offs like Seven Days In Hell, featuring a ridiculous Wimbledon men’s match that lasts a week, and Tour De Pharmacy, a tell-all about a fictional 1980s cycling doping scandal that somehow convinced Lance Armstrong to appear as a talking head. Both felt like gleefully oversized spins on ESPN’s 30 By 30, the lauded documentary strand that lionises sports stories large and small.
In the UK, the genre has quietly made a tangible comeback on the BBC, the incubational home of Ricky Gervais’s original the Office, still a high watermark of TV mockumentaries. The corporation has rubbing up against itself in W1A, a bumbling fly-on-the-wall workplace farce starring Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville as a bemused executive trapped in an inescapable series of vapid, buzzword-dense meetings. The BBC’s digital channel BBC3 also has This Country, a slice-of-life doc about kids looking for kicks in a rural English village and the excellent People Just Do Nothing, a profile of the blustering staff of underground London radio station Kurupt FM that, over the course of four skunk-swamped seasons, has become steadily more emotionally invested in its thwarted characters.
So why the rise of mockumentaries now? The best examples often orbit around characters who, consciously or not, clearly have no real idea what they’re doing. This dangerous mix of hubris and mental flat-footedness now seems more prevalent than ever. Are we subconsciously recognising and responding to the inescapable echo of mockumentary in everyday life? Perhaps that’s why HBO’s Veep – not technically a mockumentary but a show that, with its roaming, eavesdropping camera, certainly borrows from the fly-on-the-wall toolbox – is wrapping up with its eighth season next year. The real world has, sadly, caught up.
- American Vandal is now streaming on Netflix.
