After a year that saw documentaries dominate the box office and the wider culture, there’s something apt about the third season of Documentary Now! arriving so early in 2019. Created by two Saturday Night Live alumni, Bill Hader and Fred Armisen, the Emmy-winning show satirizes the most venerable of documentaries with an awareness of their importance to the genre. Hader and Armisen, along with a host of stars in amusing cameos, have created a retrospective of the most important moments in documentary film-making – and in doing so poke fun of the genre’s worst excesses. The pair have created the type of humor that perhaps only cinephiles can love (rather like Armisen’s Portlandia spoke to a specific hipster-aware audience); one that comes from recognition of tropes that can only be appreciated if has watched the films that they parody.

Each mini-spoof is introduced by Helen Mirren. Her Oscar winner’s aura is heralded and ridiculed given the subjects of the films she presents, from a traveling globes salesman to the producer of a musical about co-ops. The movies being mocked could easily make up a film history class entitled The American Documentary: 1900 to Now, taking in everything from Grey Gardens to Jiro Dreams of Sushi. What makes the comedy work so well is that the Hader and Armisen are fans as well as clowns, and they put great care into their sharp renderings. They’re aided by SNL directors Rhys Thomas and Alex Buono, who successfully ape the styles of the directors they admire. In a recent interview, Buono said: “What we try to do is come at it from a loving appreciation of whatever it is.”

Helen Mirren presenting Documentary Now! Photograph: Temma Hankin/IFC

This is clear in the amount of effort they spend on their recreations – for example, in an episode in the first season that satirized the fictional quality of Robert Flaherty’s 1922 classic Nanook of the North (one of the first successful narrative documentaries), they traveled to Iceland. As Hader said in a 2015 AV Club interview, this was because they “wanted it to feel cinematic”. A similar attention to detail jumps out in their parody of Albert and David Maysles’ 1969 film Salesman. The directors use a similar jump-cut editing style along with the original’s black-and-white film photograph, and combine it with a comedy based on an observation of history that seems odd in the present. For example, in the Maysles picture, the salesmen are forever smoking; when Hader’s salesman goes to a restaurant he barely looks at a menu before he orders cigarettes.

As we get closer to present, the laughs come from how unsettling it is that particular behavior still plagues us today. This is true in the take on Chris Hegedus and DA Pennebaker’s The War Room, which takes the fly-on-the-wall format of that portrait of the 1992 Clinton campaign to tell a story about two amoral, ignorant campaign operatives. At one point, Hader’s character, a clear impression of James Carville, Clinton’s campaign manager, puts a lawn jockey on the lawn of his opponent. This weaponization of racial animus to win votes seems quite plausible now as we see the Democratic party face a slow-burning racial conflagration of its own construction in Virginia.

Institutional rot is also analyzed in the first episode of the newest season; a tilted version of last year’s phenomenally popular Netflix documentary Wild Wild Country, with Owen Wilson as a power-mad cult leader. Though this may seem like a ploy to get new viewers, the show remains on its esoteric course for the rest of the season, with an episode starring Richard Kind targeting the Pennebaker film of the failed recording of Company, a Stephen Sondheim musical and another starring Cate Blanchett as an exaggerated – if this is even possible – version of Marina Abramović.

Though a wider audience may tune in, Documentary Now! is still a show for the cineastes.