Documentary Now, the comedy series in which creators Seth Meyers, Fred Armisen, Bill Hader and Rhys Thomas (who all met while working on Saturday Night Live) riff on real documentaries, is in its fourth season. But every episode begins with the same high-profile presenter walking towards the camera and welcoming viewers in her stern headmistressy voice to season 53.

“It is a silly joke that only works because Helen Mirren agreed to do it – that is the key,” says Meyers, the presenter of NBC’s Late Night chat show, from his home in New York, which is, he tells me, where “all the hyper-specific documentary comedy” comes from.

Liliane Rovere as Ida Leos, a filmmaker clearly based on Agnes Varda, in the Trouver Frisson episode of Documentary Now! Credit:Will Robson-Scott/AMC

Is that even a thing, hyper-specific documentary comedy?

“We’re trying to make it a thing,” he says, chuckling and fending off his four-year-old spacesuit-wearing son, who wants to be a part of whatever it is Dad is up to right now.

So do plenty of others: it may not be a huge hit with the general public, but Documentary Now! has fans in high places. The actors turning up in guest roles this season include Alexander Skarsgard, Jonathan Pryce, Tom Jones (yes, the singer), Nicholas Braun (Succession’s Cousin Greg) and, back for a second time, Cate Blanchett.

When the show started in 2015, Meyers says, “the idea was that we were going to write these fake documentaries and Bill and Fred, who are really versatile performers, would play the leads in every episode”. For the first two seasons that more or less held, as Hader and Armisen played everyone from the ageing socialites of Sandy Passage (based on Grey Gardens) to the members of New Wave band Test Pattern in Final Transmission (reference: the Talking Heads concert film Stop Making Sense).

In Soldier of Illusion, Alexander Skarsgard plays German director Rainer Wolz, who has a tempestuous relationship with actor Dieter Daimler (August Diehl), a dynamic modelled on that of Werner Herzog and Klaus Kinski in Burden of Dreams.  Credit:Will Robson-Scott/AMC

But then Hader’s hitman comedy-drama Barry took off, and Armisen’s many projects (including Portlandia and his solo music touring) and Meyers’ five-nights-a-week commitment made it almost impossible to get the band back together.

“And then we thought, ‘Well, why don’t we see who we can get’, and one of our producers said, ‘What if I wrote this episode based on [performance artist] Marina Abramovich and send it to Cate Blanchett?’”

When the double Oscar winner said yes, it opened the floodgates. “Not only do you get her, but you also get to tell other people who might be on the fence about doing it, ‘You know, Helen Mirren introduces every episode and Cate Blanchett is in one, I don’t know, maybe it’s the kind of thing …’ And so it worked out.”

The actors aren’t doing the low-budget series for the dollars – “I’m willing to bet with confidence that Cate Blanchett loses money doing this show,” Meyers says – but they do enjoy the fact they can turn up for a short spell (each episode is shot in six days) and join in something self-contained yet part of a bigger and rather fun whole.

In fact, Blanchett enjoyed her turn in season three’s Waiting for the Artist so much that she came back to the team with a suggestion of her own for season four. Two Hairdressers in Bagglyport, in which she stars with Harriet Walter (who plays the mother of Kendall, Roman and Siobhan Roy in Succession), is based on the 1994 BBC fly-on-the-wall doc Three Salons at the Seaside.

The team didn’t know that one until Blanchett brought it to them, but this season’s other episodes are a little less obscure.

The two-part Soldier of Illusion riffs on Burden of Dreams, the acclaimed Les Blank film about German director Werner Herzog making Fitzcarraldo in the depths of the Amazon – only here Alexander Skarsgard’s Rainer Wolz is trying to shoot a CBS sitcom pilot and an ethnographic film at the same time in what looks like Mongolia (it was actually Wales).

There’s a lovingly knowing riff on the work of Agnes Varda called Trouver Frisson, in which the filmmaker/philosopher/narrator Ida Leos (Liliane Rovere) utters the immortal line: “The skin is the wallpaper of the body, and wallpaper is the skin of the wall. This metaphor is so circular that to say it aloud is to waste your time.”

There’s a nod to When They Were Kings (How They Threw Rocks), while My Monkey Grifter is a reworking of My Octopus Teacher in which the narrator (Jamie Demetriou, who played Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s bus passenger would-be boyfriend in Fleabag) is swindled by his simian friend.

Seth Meyers and his co-creators met on Saturday Night Live. Credit:Lloyd Bishop/NBC

“We like to pick films from different years – you don’t want to pick five from the ’70s – and different styles,” says Meyers of the selection process. “And we always try to have at least one that more people have seen, even though the most-seen documentary is still a thin slice [of the general audience].”

The key to writing them is to “figure out the turn” on which the whole conceit hangs, he says. But to get the tone right he’ll watch the source material up to a dozen times “because so much of it is about writing in the rhythm that people talk in the documentaries”.

Ultimately, should we see these films of yours as tribute or as parody?

“I think some maybe have a little bit more teeth in them than others,” Meyers says. “But I think most of them are written from a place of love, that the original documentary was something we all enjoyed a great deal.

“I would say 80-85 per cent of them are that.”

All four seasons of Documentary Now! are on AMC+

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