This brilliant fever-dream of a docuseries opens up the world of an ageing historical festival founder as he prepares to hand over his crown – and finds vanity, sexual insecurity and kirtle-clad ugliness

This show is King Lear if Lear was on sugar-daddy dating sites and had a loudly professed interest in “natural breasts”. It’s Succession in Tudorbethan costume. It’s any backstabby reality show – but real. It’s Game of Thrones with kirtles instead of wolf skins. It’s Wolf Hall in a fever dream and polyester. It’s the three-part HBO documentary Ren Faire, a total trip that confirms the feeling that if America didn’t exist, television executives would have to invent it.

The Texas Renaissance Festival, which runs for six weeks and brings in half a million visitors and several million dollars a year – is approaching its half centenary. Its founder George Coulam – known as “the King” among his employees, even when he’s nowhere around – is now 86 and looking to retire and enjoy himself for what he believes to be the last nine years of his life. Ideally he would like “to be screwed to death” by “a female companion … I’d like a nice thin lady between 30 and 50 years old”. Failing that, there’s Switzerland where, for $25,000, “they’ll kill ya!”.