VULTURE: Something happened midway through the first season of Documentary Now!, which wrapped up last night on IFC. The show started off — and was praised for — taking pitch-perfect documentary parodies and pushing them in absurd directions: twisting Grey Gardens into a horror movie, for example, or turning Nanook Revisited, a documentary about the documentary Nanook of the North, into a bizarre tale of an Inuit who pioneered most modern-film techniques. But over the course of six “documentaries” (which included the two-part finale), it also grew increasingly humane. While the precision was still there, the goal felt like it was no longer about creating accurate parody but instead about creating truthful character studies. It built and built to the last three minutes of last night’s finale, which immediately felt like one of the most honest, human bits of comedy I’ve seen in years, if not ever. [….] The inspiration for the episode was 2013’s History of the Eagles, and it’s built around Armisen and Bill Hader as two tough, working-class Chicago guys, both descended from sausage families, who become the biggest soft-rock stars of 1974. “What sort of delighted us about that film was that you have this really soft sound — and then you have these aggressive alpha males,” Meyers told Rolling Stone. “So we started throwing this idea around about these two guys who are a little aggro and are making this kind of breezy, margarita-sipping music.” The two soft-rockers eventually break up at the height of their powers, with Hader going on to license the band’s intellectual property and live a life of luxury, and Armisen returning to the sausage plant where his parents both worked. MORE