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About halfway through the first episode of the new HBO docuseries Ren Faire, Jeff Baldwin likens his workplace to Shakespeare’s King Lear. Baldwin sees himself as Cordelia, the king’s loyal daughter who is nevertheless banished by her misguided father. Baldwin views his office rivals as Albany and Regan, the duplicitous daughters who turn on Lear once they get their inheritance.
And Lear is 86-year-old George Coulam, the owner and founder of the largest ren faire in the country who, after 50 years of running the show, says he’s ready to retire. Over the course of the three-episode series, Coulam struggles to settle on the person he’ll hand the reins of his business-cum-fiefdom. And the stakes are surprisingly high.
Coulam is asking $60 million for his Texas Renaissance Festival, which is located on hundreds of acres of land 50 miles outside of Houston. It operates only a handful of days per year but draws 500,000 people annually and maintains a robust full-time staff. Todd Mission, the town in which the festival grounds are located, was incorporated in 1982 for the sole purpose of allowing the festival to better manage its operations. The mayor of Todd Mission since its founding? George Coulam.
His employees reverently call him King George, or simply the King, but it’s never clear why they revere him in the first place. Capricious and self-indulgent, Coulam’s cruelty in undermining and humiliating his underlings is matched only by his buffoonery in trying to find a significantly younger woman with whom to spend his retirement years.
Coulam was married once, but he approaches love and sex like a math problem and discusses them with all the subtlety and insight of a 14-year-old. His hope, as he tells a beleaguered in-home aide who looks like she is perpetually stepping on a thumbtack, is that he can live out his remaining years enjoying plenty of Viagra-induced boners until he dies having sex. In one cringey scene, Coulam meets a woman with whom he connected on a sugar daddy site for a lunch date at an Olive Garden. He calls her the wrong name, then sits next to her in a booth, then asks her if her breasts are real. The woman is 60 years younger than he is.
Lear isn’t the only king Coulam brings to mind. Both Ren Faire and 2020’s Tiger King revolve around erratic theme park tyrants, but Coulam lacks Joe Exotic’s considerable charisma. As viewers watch Tiger King and begin to learn about the reckless behavior and personal darkness that help define Exotic, they still root for the guy and hope he has a happy ending. Exotic is devilish while Coulam is demonic, a grim bummer who’s just not that much fun to watch.
Nor, it would seem, is he much fun to work for. Baldwin, the genial general manager who hopes to inherit control of the festival, has worked for Coulam for more than four decades and is slavishly — disturbingly — devoted to him. Coulam undermines and humiliates him to a breaking point. Baldwin’s main rival is Louie Migliaccio, a man-bunned concessions guru who at any given moment is either talking, vaping, or guzzling energy drinks. Migliaccio is desperate to use his family’s money to purchase the festival, which he believes would turn far more profit with him at the helm. Coulam toys with him. Darla Smith, a vendor coordinator whom Coulam unexpectedly elevates to the C-suite, appears to be his favorite… until she very much isn’t.
The cutthroat intrigue is undeniably compelling, but the main characters seldom appear onscreen together, one of several holes in the storytelling. Director Lance Oppenheim augments the doc with a handful of scripted dreamlike sequences to put viewers inside characters’ heads, but the scenes beg the question of how much that kind of fictionalization bleeds into the doc as a whole. (All documentaries take small liberties to facilitate good storytelling.) Regardless of what’s happening, the series is never not interesting to watch; disorienting camerawork, saturated colors, long close-ups on subjects’ faces twisted with anger, sorrow, and fear — even scenes in bland office spaces are compellingly shot.
Ultimately, the question of who will finally gain control of the festival is… and isn’t… settled. It will be a dissatisfying ending for some viewers, but those final 20 minutes of the docuseries are its most riveting, playing out like a horror movie in which Satan reveals himself in order to damn souls. Including his own.
Paul Walter Houser exits, stage left, in ‘Resident Evil.’ Sony Pictures