An absurdist look at the EDM life in ‘What Would Diplo Do?’

Among tens of thousands of people at Shaun White’s Air & Style at Exposition Park in February, a man in a black shirt and matching baseball hat reading “Decent” across the front is running along the front barricades, collecting high-fives from delirious fans.

It’s a typical, celebration-ready scene at electronic dance music festivals, which in this case was headlined by the booming, Caribbean-informed beats of Major Lazer, a group co-founded by the superstar DJ known as Diplo. Except the figure in the crowd was not the in-demand producer who has worked with M.I.A. and Beyonce. It was James Van Der Beek in a wispy mustache acting as Diplo for the new Viceland series “What Would Diplo Do?” which premieres Thursday.

But for all the fame pop stardom affords, not everybody noticed the difference.

“The funny thing is half the people were like ‘James Van Der Beek?’ And other people — you know, it was dark out, I’m sure some people were intoxicated,” explains 31-year-old series director Brandon Dermer, who worked with Diplo (born Thomas Wesley Pentz) and festival organizers to arrange the guerrilla-style shoot that appears in the show’s first episode. But many people had no clue. “He’s wearing a shirt that says ‘Diplo’ on the back, he’s got the hat,” Dermer adds. “Some people were coming up, ‘Dude, I saw you in Vegas last month, you were great!’”

It’s that kind of blur between reality and fiction that makes up the bulk of material for the series, Viceland’s first scripted comedy. Co-created by Dermer and Van Der Beek, the series (with Diplo as executive producer) tweaks the persona of the pop star in a way that combines the playful satire of “This Is Spinal Tap” with a show business version of “The Office.”

The result is something of a workplace comedy revolving around a pop star’s misadventures and the attempts to manage those mistakes by his team, which includes comic Bobby Lee, Groundlings veteran H. Michael Croner, DJ and festival fixture Dillon Francis and Dora Madison of “Friday Night Lights,” who appears as one of Diplo’s assistants and the only person anchored in the real world.

Between takes at a buzzing Sunset Gower Studios, Van Der Beek excitedly recalled how the show captured its concert footage, which included his striking Diplo’s wide-armed “Jesus pose” in front of a capacity crowd while the real Diplo performed behind him. Dermer later recalled Diplo coaching Van Der Beek before another live shoot at the Mad Decent Block Party concert in L.A. last October, showing him which buttons to press while onstage and when to crowd surf to find the most believable performance.

“(Wes) is allergic to taking himself too seriously,” Van Der Beek says of the DJ. He added that, if anything, the writers had to rein in Pentz’s ideas for how he was portrayed.

“Being in the public eye, everyone wants to speculate on who you are, what you do in your personal time, pass judgments on how you live your life,” said Pentz, who was reached via email. “I’d rather embrace the speculation, turn it into a joke and have fun with it.”