Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Ren Faire’ On HBO, A Docuseries About A Succession Fight To Control The Texas Renaissance Festival

Ren Faire is a three-part docuseries, directed by Lance Oppenheim, that examines the succession fight to take over the Texas Renaissance Festival, the largest ren faire in North America. George Coulam, known to everyone who works for the festival as “King George”, founded the festival 50 years ago and built it into the juggernaut it is today. But he’s 86 and ready to retire, and two people have emerged as the frontrunners to take it over.

REN FAIRE: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: An elderly man stands on a hill next to a cross. “What is a king without his kingdom? What is a king without his property? He’s free,” says a voice.

The Gist: Although the Texas Renaissance Festival runs during September and October, it’s so huge that the people who work for are there year-round; George Coulam even incorporated a town named Todd Mission, where the faire is located and the people who work there live.

The faire has brought King George lots of wealth, but his general mistrust of people and his devotion to his creation has left him without companionship aside from people on his payroll. According to his young assistant Victor, his profile is now on fifteen different online dating sites, many of them “sugar daddy” sites, where he’s looking for a much younger woman to be with him. His massive house is decorated to look like a medieval castle. He also seems to have an obsession with death; he’s set to travel to Switzerland and die via assisted suicide when he’s 95 years old.

One of the people looking to take over is Jeff Baldwin; he’s worked for the faire for over 40 years and was recently promoted into the general manager position. “He’s Willy Wonka; and I’m lucky to be the head oompa loompa,” he says. He comes from an entertainment background, and while he’s not the strongest on the business side, he thinks he knows inside and out how the faire operates, second only to King George himself. He claims that he’s the executor of George’s estate, and that a succession plan is in place.

The other rival is Louie Migliaccio, the Red Bull-guzzling “Lord of Corn”; he started with a kettle corn stand at the faire and rapidly expanded his empire to a number of vendor stands and the faire’s main pub. He not only has ideas to modernize and expand the faire but has his family money to back up those plans.

He thinks Jeff is the wrong guy to take over for King George, with one of the big pieces of evidence being that when Jeff was promoted from entertainment director to general manager, he put his wife Brandi in his old job. The two of them met and fell in love at the festival, and Jeff truly feels she’s the best person for the job, given her acting and ComedySportz background. But when we see George talking to his driver about it, he keeps spitting out the word “nepotism”; he thinks there’s no place for it in business.

As Jeff and Brandi travel to Germany to examine how they do renaissance festivals there, Louie meets with King George, and Jeff’s assistant calls him to give him some bad news.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Even though Ren Faire is a docuseries and The Curse is scripted, the styles of the two shows are similar. It’s not a coincidence that Josh and Bennie Safdie are executive producers of both shows.

Our Take: What Oppenheim tries to do with Ren Faire is take the docuseries genre and infuse it with as many dramatic elements as possible. So there are extreme closeups, and ominous background music. But what he does most is take images and make them into what seems like peyote-infused fantasies, either through visuals, sound or both.

But what we find interesting is that he’s not doing this in order to boost a story that would seem to be boring if presented in a straightforward manner. King George is quite a character, a guy who built this festival from nothing, in the middle of nowhere, to the biggest one in North America. But that dedication has made him into this death-obsessed mess who wants to control every aspect of his life, down to the day of his death and the 30-something woman he would like to spend his remaining years with. The people who work for him all seem to think he’s fair and generous, but he certainly comes off as bitter crank whose mind for business leads his behavior.

Jeff and Louie are also both fun characters to follow, because they’re such opposite personalities. While both are intense, Jeff’s intensity comes from his love of the festival and to George, whom he’s dedicated his entire adult life to. Louie, on the other hand, has ideas, man, and knows that if George sells the faire to him, he’ll make it grow even bigger. His laser focus on taking over is fueled by caffeine and sugar, and he’s convinced himself that Jeff will just run George’s creation into the ground if he takes over.

So there’s a lot of intriguing storylines already in this real-life Succession story. But we did enjoy touches like when Oppenheim uses muffled audio to show George’s mind is elsewhere while he has his weekly briefing with Jeff, or the altered sights and sounds Jeff experiences after the phone call from his assistant while he’s in Germany. How he got the people to participate in those scenes also intrigues us; were these things shot afterwards and clipped back in to add drama, or was this real-time footage altered to amp up drama?

Sex and Skin: None.

Parting Shot: Dramatic shots of a distraught Jeff and a smiling Louie; Louie’s teeth shine white when black light is reflected on them.

Sleeper Star: We’ll give this to Brandi Baldwin, who only admits that she “serves George” after a lot of prompting from Jeff.

Most Pilot-y Line: What we’re unclear about is how the festival passes from George to Jeff after George dies. Does George just inherit the festival? Because for Louie to take over, he has to buy it from George.

Our Call: STREAM IT. Ren Faire works not only because it’s dramatic and stylish, but also because it’s a docuseries about some pretty interesting characters in a tension-filled situation.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.