The A.V. Club is in the midst of singling out some of the 2025 Emmy nominees we’re rooting for, with interviews with performers (like yesterday’s chat with Dying For Sex‘s Jenny Slate, who’s up for Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie) and shorter appreciation pieces that sing the praises of artists in mostly below-the-line categories (like this very article you’re reading now). And while it’s admittedly hard to think of an episode of documentary TV as visually arresting as 100 Foot Wave‘s trip to catch swells more than 100 miles off the coast of California, seeing as Chris Smith’s surfing series has already won twice for Outstanding Cinematography for a Nonfiction Program, it feels like time to spread the love and give another show the statuette.
And that show should be HBO’s Ren Faire. The three-episode docuseries is sort of like Succession meets a Renaissance festival, with different longtime employees vying to take over things from the institution’s elderly, curmudgeonly, set-to-retire patriarch. Our Ken, Rome, and Shiv in this case are Jeff Baldwin, a general manager who’s worked for the massively successful Texas Renaissance Festival for four decades; Louie Migliaccio, a Red Bull-pounding ball of energy who runs kettle-corn operations and has big ideas to bring nightlife to the park; and Darla Smith, an ambitious elephant trainer who starts climbing up the ladder to eventually become right-hand woman for this series’ Logan Roy, George Coulam.
“King George”—a moniker he embraces, literally walking around with a gold crown sometimes—is talked about as a living legend: “He’s not crazy; he’s just thinking on a level you can’t comprehend,” says one employee. “George is a visionary genius. He built this vision, and, uh, it’s a utopia,” adds another. He’s an oddball whose home is filled with quirk and kitsch, the kind of guy who has tons of files with labels like “life’s 20 year master plan” (flashes of Dignan in Bottle Rocket) and speaks incredibly candidly about sex and longing to be a sugar daddy for someone in his mid-80s (let alone someone being filmed by a documentary crew). “The perfect way to go would be to have a woman screw me to death,” he tells his nurse, who looks on awkwardly. “And that’s my goal.”
He’s the sort of colorful character you’d expect the Safdie brothers (who previously executive produced the great HBO docuseries Telemarketers) to be fascinated by and want to spend time with. But, unlike that very personal aforementioned doc, there is nothing raw or endearingly lo-fi about Ren Faire. The series, from director Lance Oppenheim (Spermworld), is notably stylized and theatrical, especially for a documentary. Saying it dips into style-over-substance territory might sound like a pejorative. But it’s not—and it’s a fitting aesthetic choice: This tale should be as heightened and performative and reality-blurring as this if it’s going to hold our attention and keep us entertained over three hours. Besides, what’s more of a show or a fantasy that a Ren faire?
A lot of the credit for that visual flair goes to, obviously, Ren Faire‘s cinematographer, Nate Hurtsellers. “We knew that we wanted to push the fantasy,” he told Gold Derby earlier this month of his approach to the look of the project with Oppenheim. “We were really trying to make a statement with lenses and how we move the camera and where we put it.” The DP, who had previously worked on Theater Camp and I Used To Go Here (disclosure: this writer’s name appears in the end credits for the latter film for performing on songs featured in it), leans into compositions that feel cinematic and planned out and not particularly documentary-like. But again, that’s the point. The camera slowly zooms in on an employee to amp up the tension during an otherwise mundane budget meeting; a character is introduced from the back against a bright blue sky, with a glare that brings to mind Paul Thomas Anderson films; Migliaccio is lit with an envy-green light in a close-up; and there are so many striking images of our Willy Wonka’s playland, from dudes chopping wood under the crisp night sky to firebreathers and performers in ornate costumes. It can be a lot—but it’s also consistently wonderful to look at, never fully tipping over into a style that’s too mannered or losing sight of the story unfolding.
