Ferrell & Co. are back on TV with even funnier ‘Spoils’

The six-episode, three-night miniseries, airing on IFC from Wednesday through Friday, July 8-10, is a spinoff of last year’s “The Spoils of Babylon,” featuring some of the same characters who now populate the supposedly long-suppressed early film by author and director Eric Jonrosh, a legend in his own mind, as the saying goes.

[...] he’s a Falstaffian figure modeled on Orson Welles, and that figure is quite round when we meet him in the introductions and farewells bracketing each episode.

In his quest for the truth about Fresno’s killer, Banyon encounters a chain-smoking bartender in a gay bar (Molly Shannon), a necrophiliac coroner (Tim Meadows), a drugged-out hooker (Kate McKinnon), a gay barfly who identifies himself as a “hahma-sexual” (Michael Sheen), a high-rolling drug dealer (Chris Parnell) and a pair of comically typecast cops (Steve Tom, Marc Evan Jackson), among others.

All of this is presented in a smoky haze of hilarity, with ridiculously stupid mock noir dialogue, and cinematography so densely layered, it’s hard to know what you’re supposed to be watching.

Since Jonrosh apparently couldn’t pay for location shots, exteriors are all represented by toy cars ambling along through miniature cities.

The earlier miniseries spoofed ’40s melodramas, but this year’s model takes a narrower approach, mining the staples of the even more formulaic noir films, capturing the excesses of the hard-boiled dialogue and pushing them just far enough over the edge to knock you out of your chair.