Nathan for You is a reality show, hosted by Nathan Fielder. Nathan Fielder is a person I do not understand, despite having watched each episode of his so-called reality more than once. Watching Nathan For You has been – pretty much from the beginning – about the process of the viewer trying to figure out who Fielder is. Making Nathan For You, on the other hand, seems to have been – from slightly after the beginning – the process of Fielder trying to find out the same thing for himself.<\/p>\n I believe I have written about reality television at some point before, although I cannot fully recall when. The Real World definitely came up in something I wrote in early 2011, but I think that was mostly in the context of writing about the film American Teen, a movie I was briefly obsessed with. As I am in the process of finding out today, reality television is a difficult thing to discuss, because you never quite know which decisions were pre-decided and which had to be made on a moment\u2019s notice. (Which is often the case on a scripted film set as well, but it\u2019s always infinitely more obvious on reality television simply because of the constructs of the genre.) Nathan For You doubles down on this specifically because I don\u2019t actually believe Nathan For You is a reality show.<\/p>\n So this is where we begin, I suppose. I call a non-reality show a reality show, and we try to find the happy medium from there.<\/p>\n The basic construction of a standard episode of Nathan For You goes as follows: Nathan Fielder enters a business that is looking to become more successful, pitches an idea that seems like it could only possibly make the business less successful, and convinces the proprietors that this pitch is not a terrible idea. From there, Fielder enacts this scheme in what is often the most difficult seeming way possible: say, growing a deli\u2019s business via hiring a Michael Richards impersonator to leave a large tip (a scheme which, for some reason, also involves the creation of a fake newspaper called The Diarrhea Times). And yet, this deli\u2019s scheme was in the lower 50% of bizarre hurdles Fielder and his team have laid out for themselves over four seasons.<\/p>\n Within these episodes, Nathan For You often plays on people\u2019s willingness to do almost anything a camera crew asks them to, an instinct that remains weirdly prevalent in modern culture. Since a person with a camera crew is pitching the businesses these absurd ideas, for some reason the people who make it into the final cuts of the episodes trust that being surrounded by said crew means that the ideas captured on camera have been vetted. The subjects of Nathan For You are so used to reality television being prevalent in culture that they (presumably) assume this show will eventually be edited into something as boring and normal-seeming as an episode of Property Brothers, and (presumably) these subjects blame their ignorance of how television is produced on assuming the man in the windbreaker pitching these crazy ideas is not actually a crazy person. Nathan For You is a show that, in its third season premiere, had an electronics store owner describe Fielder\u2019s schemes to a clinical psychologist, after which the shop owner was promptly declared insane. And yet people still do what Fielder asks. This construction of a certain sort of reality leads to some unreal levels of humour.<\/p>\n (I feel obligated to note that Nathan For You often seems to be built on the outright stupidity of others. Sometimes this makes me uncomfortable, because there are episodes of Nathan For You that are clearly built around people who simply don\u2019t quite grasp what is happening. Sometimes Fielder will outright lie to a subject\u2019s face to trick them: the pest control scheme features a scene where Fielder convinces a hotel manager that signing a contract will only be used for the purposes of giving the show\u2019s story an ending [and that this contract is not legally binding]. Instead, the contract ends up having a clause in it that has language basically saying that even though Fielder said this wasn\u2019t the case, the contract is still legally binding.<\/em><\/p>\n In my semi-professional existence, I have to sign contracts pretty frequently. Due to the aforementioned semi-ness of my professionalism, I cannot afford a lawyer to look over my contracts, so surely it is relatively easy to slip a clause or two past me. Usually I am given these contracts in a situation that is not ideal to take fifteen minutes to stop a meeting and go read some legalese, so I read the contract in a room where it seems more than plausible I could miss a line in a contract. Usually these contracts come from established businesses or organizations, so I assume they are not trying to screw me over, which is exactly the thought process these Nathan For You subjects go through on camera. They sign because they trust Fielder is legitimate, and they don\u2019t want to be the one person holding up the process.<\/em><\/p>\n Do I think people should read contracts before they sign them? Yes. Do I think the average person should be able to sort out that the show they are participating in is a prank show? Most of the time, yes. I suppose I worry that in the same situation I might react in the same way.)<\/em><\/p>\n In the episodes that more or less fit the Nathan For You formula, the most intriguing moments are always when Fielder seems to be genuinely surprised. There is the moment in the gas station episode where Fielder is flummoxed by the owner\u2019s casual mention that he has consumed his grandson\u2019s urine, leading to some hilariously reactionary questioning from Fielder. In the ghost realtor episode \u2013 where the realtor drops the informational bomb that a spirit once attacked her in Switzerland \u2013 Fielder appears to have no idea this information was coming. In the latter case, it seems unlikely that the producers hadn\u2019t known about the realtor\u2019s experience (in screening potential realtors for an episode that was going to hinge on belief in the paranormal, there surely would have been questions about these topics in the realtor\u2019s initial interview), but I also believe those producers willfully left Fielder in the dark. I suspect this is what happens almost every time Fielder appears surprised over the course of the show: he too is in the dark about what they\u2019re really getting at on the show. It\u2019s a show with a mystery man\u2019s name in the title, but the show frequently seems a mystery to even that man.<\/p>\n Naturally, anybody writing about Nathan For You has to reference its outlier episodes, if only partially because the most recent season wrapped up with its biggest outlier yet. Finding Frances, the season four finale, has spawned more thinkpieces (including my own) in the weeks after its release than everything Nathan For You has done since going on the air in February 2013. It is not the most widely known moment of the show (that would be Dumb Starbucks), but Finding Frances seems to be the call to action for all the dummies like me who have thought about this show for four years without quite being able to find our way into its world.<\/p>\n But not yet. We\u2019ll get there when we get there.<\/p>\n Since its first season, Nathan For You has taken exceptional amounts of glee in fucking with people who accept what they\u2019re seeing on a screen as undoctored fact. From the second episode of the show – which featured the creation of a widely-circulated video where a pig appears to rescue a goat from drowning \u2013 Fielder has been playing with expectations of both viewers of his own show and those whose most recent experience with a Comedy Central show was seeing a clip of Dave Chappelle saying \u201cI\u2019m Rick James, bitch!\u201d in 2003. Fielder wants us all to know that this world is a lie, but he refuses to outright tell us. He\u2019ll show us instead, and at least hide the truth from us for a bit before revealing we\u2019re all idiots.<\/p>\n As mentioned above, the show\u2019s biggest crossover moment came with Dumb Starbucks, a scheme that used fair use and parody law to basically open a Starbucks store simply by putting the word \u201cdumb\u201d in front of everything on the menu. (Dumb Latte, Dumb Americano, Dumb Norah Jones Duets, etc.) The store (which was technically an art gallery) became an overnight sensation, and even more than the previous season\u2019s petting zoo video (eventually) drew attention to Nathan For You itself when Fielder gave a press conference in front of the store. By not revealing who was behind the shop at first, though, rumours even began swirling that the store was the work of Banksy, which is a fucking hilarious anecdote that Fielder should tell in every social situation for the rest of his life. Dumb Starbucks somehow became a de facto deleted scene from Exit Through the Gift Shop: if you tell people something is art over and over, they just might believe it.<\/p>\n Nathan For You is art. Nathan For You is art. Nathan For You is art. Nathan For You is art. Nathan For You is art. Nathan For You is art. Nathan For You is art.<\/p>\n In the last couple of seasons, Fielder seems to have become interested in special episodes with a bit more specificity, focusing on niches of media we watch. With The Hero, Fielder and company looked at the concept of one-off stunt shows, and the idea that a person can seem like a hero for attempting something that is basically an ill-advised idea. And this year, Fielder created a story that couldn\u2019t possibly be real to tell on various talk shows during his season four press tour before actually making that story (technically, in some capacity) real. Fielder got himself invited to a stranger\u2019s wedding simply by asking and being silent long enough to make them uncomfortable, and flew somebody who would conceivably wear a larger suit than Fielder to and from Los Angeles to San Francisco exclusively to create a luggage mix-up. The resulting episode reminded the viewer of the stupidity of talk shows, the fakery that goes into the promotion of any piece of media, and the unrelenting dedication Nathan Fielder has for exposing stupidity and fakery.<\/p>\n That is where the joy of the show lies. The pain though, the hardest parts of Nathan For You to watch, are always the scenes that are left to feel slightly too real. These are, of course, the scenes where Fielder is being purposefully weird exclusively to make the people around him squirm. There\u2019s the scene in the rapid house cleaning episode where he tries to convince a group of maids that the man whose house they just cleaned is single and available, or basically any scene where Fielder asks somebody if they want to hang out off-camera. In these scenes, Fielder is clearly acting in some capacity, but the idea from the awkwardness always seems to come from somewhere real. (Fielder has said his Nathan For You persona is based on his teenage self.)<\/p>\n Anytime you\u2019re watching a comedy designed to make you uncomfortable, you\u2019re laughing mostly because the person making you uncomfortable can\u2019t read the room. Fielder should know that these people don\u2019t really want to hang out with him off-camera, and yet he tries anyway. We laugh because this self-characterization of Fielder can\u2019t read the room, but we can\u2019t watch because there have been too many times when we were the person who couldn\u2019t read the space we were in. And this is where we come to Finding Frances.<\/p>\n (If you\u2019re reading this, you know what Finding Frances is. You know that it features Nathan For You\u2019s resident Bill Gates impersonator, the seventy-seven year-old Bill Heath, trying to find the long lost love of his youth. It takes Fielder and Heath all over the place, but mostly Alabama and Michigan, and features all sorts of schemes and self-delusion. I shouldn\u2019t need to tell you this, because you are a person with a vested interest in Nathan For You who has already read over 2000 of my largely nonsensical words about it. But in discussing a show about pointing out constructions, I must point out the particular constructions of my own writing. To not do so would be as irresponsible as not reading a contract before signing it.)<\/em><\/p>\n Nathan For You\u2019s purest distillation of the tendency to make the viewer uncomfortable comes in the scene where Bill calls Frances from the car, a car that is parked just outside Frances\u2019 house in rural Michigan. I initially laughed incredibly hard at Fielder\u2019s reactions to Bill\u2019s awkward phone conversation, but I quickly began to find the scene physically impossible to look at. At this point, we have been in this story for (assuming you\u2019re watching a commercial-free download of the extra long special) a full hour, and who knows how long Bill has been living this quest in real time. Bill\u2019s total failure to understand what he\u2019s doing is a hardheaded quest that can\u2019t possibly end the way he wants it to is depressing, because anybody watching Finding Frances has gone through the experience of slowly realizing that they are wrong and felt stupid about it. Bill just seems to be coming to this realization in front of a camera crew that has followed his idiocy cross country.<\/p>\n This is where I come to the conclusion that the people making Nathan For You are not horrible people. When Bill and Nathan arrive at Frances\u2019 driveway, Nathan seems entirely unwilling to bring the cameras to the doorstep with Bill as he rings the bell (even though Bill explicitly asks him to). Any other reality show that only cared about getting the most sensational moment possible obviously would have followed Bill to the doorstep; Nathan For You\u2019s decision not to indicates that there are some private moments that even they won\u2019t intrude on. After all the time spent on finding Frances, the producers and Fielder knew that the only thing waiting was embarrassment. And despite some of Bill\u2019s more questionable views on politics and consent, even Fielder isn\u2019t comfortable with the idea of profiting off of this man\u2019s total crushing disappointment (they\u2019ll take a partial version of that disappointment instead). The filmmakers still let Bill feel it gradually, and he\u2019s still on camera when he does, but somehow there\u2019s a feeling of kindness present in the choice. They let Bill get punched in the face, but they broke up the fight before he could get pummeled.<\/p>\n![\"nathan1\"](\"http:\/\/themacguffinmen.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/11\/nathan1.jpg\")
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