HBO’s Engrossing ‘Ren Faire’ Is A Grand Statement On The Uniquely American Addiction To Work

It has become abundantly clear that a significant bloc of viewers watch narrative TV in the same way and for many of the same reasons that other people watch sports. The time-honored tradition of siloing fandom into rival factions — from Beatlemaniacs orienting their entire selves around a crush on John or Paul to the bitter war between Teams Edward and Jacob — is now wagging the dog, as scripted entertainment accommodates and anticipates the hard-wired human pathology to compete and triumph. Game of Thrones exploded into such a monster hit in part for how it stoked this behavior, starting with the “win or die” slogan that reduced the vast saga to a single question debated by weekly “power rankings” less concerned with criticism or analysis than whose favorite did best. HBO evidently took notice, their programming in the following years favoring scrums for the seat at the head of the table in big, rich, fractious families; in this respect, Succession is probably the finest product of algorithmic favor we’ve seen yet.

Though as a country-fried send-up of the bizarre cottage industries that flourish in the exurban South, The Righteous Gemstones has a bit more in common with Ren Faire, HBO’s latest tooth-and-nail battle to fill a vacuum of authority. This one also happens to be a documentary, shot at the sprawling, hugely lucrative Texas Renaissance Festival as founder and CEO George Coulam prepares to hand off the reins to a worthy heir. Looking like a latter-day John Ford with his wandering eyeball and military-medal-bedecked shirt, the octogenarian “King George” would like to settle down and rededicate himself to acquiring a wife (with natural breasts, of course — implants are a dealbreaker for him), but to whom shall he bequeath his crown? 

In this corner, longtime general manager Jeff Baldwin (pictured below) boasts on-the-ground experience and unalloyed love for the enterprise, but lacks the killer instinct required to captain a big business. In this corner, Red Bull-chugging kettle corn magnate/vendor extraordinaire Louie Migliaccio plans to juice profits with douchey mixology and burlesque performers, at the risk of corrupting a place revered as sacred by visitors and employees alike. And let’s not count out dark horse Darla Smith, her quiet competence a serious threat to either man’s grand designs. The fight is on!

The ensuing melee of maneuvering makes for terrifically engrossing amusement, complete with double-crossings, abrupt reversals of fortune, and dark nights of the soul. Director Lance Oppenheim continues his campaign to expand the aesthetic palette of the documentary form, last furthered in the spring with Spermworld, now styling his footage with expressive lenses, saturated color-grading, and gleaming light effects, all of which call to mind the lushness of Excalibur. More conspicuous flourishes of creative license — the angel figurines whispering in George’s ear to sell, the wry dragon-headed figure who appears to commemorate moments of great consequence like Uatu the Watcher — augment the raw material of reality, and convey Oppenheim’s belief in nonfiction cinema as an even synthesis of observation and artistry. It may sound like underhanded praise to commend a doc on its emulation of a Real Movie, but works like this one herald a brighter future in which that unproductive distinction has been eroded in full.

As with Spermworld, Oppenheim’s technique hinges on his ability to locate and earn the confidence of colorful weirdoes, their eccentricities treated with honesty (it would take a lot of work to obscure the inherent comedy in here) tempered by compassion. George, for example, is crazy, and not even just in the way that having an obscene amount of money with no taste makes anyone look crazy. Beyond the palatial estate filled with ostentatious shows of conspicuous consumption — shades of Trump, more on that in a second — he’s a sex-obsessed narcissist with the same regard for women that he has for anyone else on his payroll, visibly warped by his self-spun bubble of wealth. As he sits waiting for his umpteenth date at his favored Olive Garden, soon to be summarily sent away for failing to meet his extreme and chauvinistic list of bodily demands, it occurs to a viewer that he must be quite lonely. Likewise, Jeff’s slavering sycophancy stems from a deep-seated commitment to his career and its craft, while Louie’s motormouthed sketchiness belies a sincere, sympathetic desire to prove himself to his underwhelmed family. 

This sort of fine-point portraiture for insular subcultures and the outsized personalities populating them has been Oppenheim’s strong suit as long as he’s been working, but Ren Faire sees him widening the scope of his ambitions. The fervent jockeying for control blooms into a grander statement on the uniquely American addiction to work, a sickness that blurs the line between performance goals and personal fulfillment. In the opening montage, we hear worshipful voiceover from the many laborers who revere George as a deity astride the mortal plane, not just the man who signs their checks or mayor in the town of Todd Mission that he founded, but a real live god. (Dissecting this cult of personality, down to the prefab community incorporated as a housing project for the business employing the citizenry, probably represents the closest we’ll ever get to a seriously critical inside perspective on Disney World and the town of Celebration, Florida that services it, with King George as the untethered id of Uncle Walt.) 

Director Lance Oppenheim continues his campaign to expand the aesthetic palette of the documentary form, now styling his footage with expressive lenses, saturated color-grading, and gleaming light effects, all of which call to mind the lushness of Excalibur.

Anyone who’s worked a shitty gig will recognize, perhaps with muscles tensed, George’s combination of nitpicking oversight and flagrant disregard for detail. The time-warp setting casts the modern manager as petty tyrant, issuing edicts from on high with the simple demand that they be met, no matter the practicalities involved; this attitude of “Make it so!” links the chortling monarchs of old with the ornery, visionless executives of today in contempt for their underlings. Jeff must constantly negotiate with himself over how much he’s willing to sacrifice for a boss who thinks so little of him, and always winds up rationalizing his own willingness to fall in line, much to the chagrin of his put-upon wife. He’ll learn the hard way that no matter how much you love a job, it will never love you back, while — spoiler alert — George changes his tune and decides to retain his. 

The final episode of Ren Faire unfolds with a sense of tragedy that’s deeply satisfying despite its undermining of the series’ central conceit, answering the burning mystery of who will emerge victorious with a resounding “No one!” George turns increasingly irritable as he inches closer to the retirement he once claimed to would make him a free man, that opening line of narration inverted to express his insecurity that without his daily docket of meetings and decisions, he has nothing. His reluctance to step down out of an unexamined fear of obsolescence opens up the subtext of the series, which sneakily comes to address a broader generational epidemic of clinging. As we trudge toward an election between the oldest-ever President and the second-oldest President, as Supreme Court justices decline to resign at politically opportune times for no other seeming reason than to hold onto their titles, as the job market constricts to a miserable tightness, as the environment continues to erode due to the actions of people who will not have to worry about living in it, the heedless George morphs into a mascot for a pervasive gerontocracy stretching far beyond his fiefdom.

Gonzo oater The Wild Bunch opens with a scorpion getting overtaken by ants, a squirmy symbol for the fracturing of the West as settlers approached; a shot near the end of Ren Faire strikes a similarly elegiac note as bugs swarm a headstone, as if in prediction that George has sealed a doomed fate for that which he holds dearest. His pathological need to be in charge will send his magnificent enterprise toward a dead end, the same no-future facing too many sectors of American life. In this game, everyone comes out a loser. 

Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevassse) is a film and television critic living in Brooklyn. In addition to Decider, his work has also appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Nylon, Vulture, The A.V. Club, Vox, and plenty of other semi-reputable publications. His favorite film is Boogie Nights.