HBO's Ren Faire Is the Eccentric Real-Life Succession You Didn't Know You Needed

HBO loves stories about succession. 

There's Succession, of course, but also Game of Thrones and House of the Dragon. And now there's Ren Faire, a three-part docuseries that's available to watch in its entirety on Max. 

HBO understands the inherent dramatic stakes of succession stories, which are always about power, desire, and conflict, and contain larger-than-life characters with fascinating flaws. 

Ren Faire has all of those things, and unlike Succession and Game of Thrones, it's real. (It's also heightened in a way that makes it more unique and interesting than it would be as a more traditional documentary, which I'll get to in a bit). 

The funny and sad doc tells the story of a tumultuous time at the Texas Renaissance Festival, the largest renaissance fair in the country. The festival's eccentric and domineering founder, George Coulam, is 86 years old, and wants to spend the nine years he has left (he's set on living to precisely 95, no more, no less) making art, working on his expansive garden, and "chasing ladies" he meets on sugar daddy websites. Selling the fair would allow him to retire, but that might not be what he really wants. Because now he's the king, and what's a king when he doesn't have a kingdom?

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There are three people vying to take his place as king. There's Jeffrey Baldwin, the festival's groveling general manager, who has devoted his life to the ren faire. Jeff serves at George's behest, and doesn't want the king to sell because it would disrupt the status quo. There's Louie Migliaccio, a kettle corn impresario who's so caffeinated that he speaks as quickly as an auctioneer. He wants to buy the festival and remake it in his capitalist image. And there's Darla Smith, a former elephant trainer who quietly commands a lot of power within the festival. They're all competing for the king's favor, and have very different strategies for doing so. In Succession terms, their closest analogues are Jeff is Tom, Louie is Kendall, and Darla is Gerri, with King George obviously Logan Roy.

They're all wonderful characters — and "characters" is the word for them, both because they're all such unusual people and because they're performers working with director Lance Oppenheim to give the real-life drama a cinematic flair. 

Ren Faire is highly stylized, with impressionistic, dreamlike interludes that bring Jeff and Louie's emotional states to life. The scenes' psychedelic colors and creepy sound design call to mind folk horror movies like Midsommar or psychological thrillers like Black Swan. It's artifice that's honest about what it is.

"For discerning viewers, I'm trying to make this as legibly cheated as possible," Oppenheim explained in an interview with Variety. "The fact that these people are excited to put these moments on-screen with me adds another kind of documentary truth. It doesn't make it any less real." 

Ren Faire isn't a journalistically rigorous documentary, but it's an artistic, creative, and entertaining one. Oppenheim shoots it beautifully, with outdoor wide-angle shots that always seem to capture the big Texas sky and indoor closeups that get inside the characters' heads. 

Ren Faire is executive-produced by the Safdie Brothers, and it's easy to see what drew them to the project. The Uncut Gems directors like nonprofessional actors and highly specific communities, and Oppenheim is obviously a kindred spirit. There's also a lot of Nathan Fielder, Benny Safdie's collaborator on The Curse and creator of HBO's genre-defying reality-comedy The Rehearsal, in Oppenheim's approach. The young filmmaker is obviously tremendously talented and destined for big things. He'll inevitably make the jump to narrative features, and he'll be a director to watch as he does.

But for now, he's given us this real-life story that's as meaty as a turkey leg. Like Succession, it's a tragedy wrapped in a comedy. The stakes aren't quite as high, but the players in the game feel them just as intensely. 

Ren Faire is available to stream on Max.