Fun
Frisky
Nostalgic
Intense
Adventurous
Choked Up
Curious
Romantic
Weird
You never know what you’re gonna get when you open up Netflix and start scrolling through all those options. “Trending Now,” “Popular on Netflix,” “Because you accidentally watched five seconds of The Ranch once”–Netflix has a lotta ways to get content in front of your eyes.
If you’ve scrolled around recently, perhaps you’ve seen something called Party Monster: Scratching the Surface suggested, as seen below in my personal “Recently Added” section. is it a sequel to the 2003 club kids biopic Party Monster starring Macaulay Culkin and Seth Green? It looks like another one of Netflix’s true crime docs, and also… is that Jon Hamm?!
The truth is that is Jon Hamm, it has nothing to do with Macaulay Culkin, and it is a Netflix true crime doc… sorta.
Actually, this is a big meta joke from Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Season 4, which dropped on Netflix back in May. Episode 3 of Season 4 was unlike any episode of the series before or after, in that it was completely disguised as a fake doc from within the Kimmy Schmidt universe detailing the rise and fall of Reverend/DJ Richard Wayne Gary Wayne (played by Jon Hamm). The episode so thoroughly parodies Netflix docs like Making a Murderer that Kimmy Schmidt’s instantly recognizable theme song doesn’t even play in the episode, and you really only see Kimmy in “archival” news footage.
Now in addition to being part of Kimmy Schmidt’s fourth season, the standalone episode has been lifted out of context and dropped into the regular Netflix rotation, acting as a bit of fun, weird meta marketing for a fun, weird, meta episode of Kimmy Schmidt. It even has its own landing page!
It’ll be fascinating to see how newcomers react to this “doc,” especially if they stumble across it thinking it’s either real or one of Jon Hamm’s many post-Mad Men films. People are slowly starting to discover it, expressing their surprise on Twitter:
Who knows if this is gonna become a whole new way for Netflix to market shows? I’d keep an eye out for the one, “for real” episode of GLOW (the recent episode that is totally the show within a show) to break out on its own, though… you never know!
