okay. so. Nathan Fielder. to really understand the full weight of this you kinda have to like, go back to the start.
nathan's first show was called "Nathan For You." the basic premise is that it's one of those "expert guy shows up and helps your business" shows. so why is it on comedy central? well, fundamentally nathan is a comedian, and so the ideas are just silly. the very first one is a froyo place that wants to drum up some more business. so he suggests that they start serving a poop flavor of ice cream. they agree. he gets a lab to formulate up something that supposedly tastes like poop, but is safe to eat. it goes like you'd expect, some people order it, say "this tastes like shit" and they go "well you did order poop ice cream i dunno".
but the thing is, nathan has this deadpan way about him. he doesn't really laugh. they're jokes but they're also like, funny. it's often described as "cringe comedy" but i think it's meaningfully different than most other things in that genre, there's a weird sincerity here, an extreme dedication to committing to the bit. most cringe comedy is like "I am doing something that you will find uncomfortable and now you're uncomfortable, ha ha", but nathan has this way about him where he mostly pulls strange interactions out of others.
im trying to think of the best way to describe all of this because it's kinda very non-chronological actually, haha. there's at least one episode late in the show that comes back around to like, three weeks ago. i think i'll just leave it at that for now
anyway, so there's also always been this underlying question of, is nathan playing a character or not? what's funny is, during the four seasons of Nathan For You, he did go legitimately viral a few times with his ideas for the businesses. like, it spoiled part of the show, because while filming it they did actually get five minutes of fame. so this already sorta starts to blend the comedy/reality together.
so like, is nathan playing a character? or is that him? where does real nathan stop and TV nathan begin? when he does press, he never breaks character. people have dug into his past, and like, it really truly appears he's just been the kind of person he is for basically ever. there's pictures of him as an awkward teen that look just like the way he's awkward now.
I think at this point it's definitive that he's a character, but the 'i think' is still WILD. like, it's a character that's a very thin augmentation of his self. because also if you play a character so often and for so long, that kind of is you? like, what does it even mean to be a person? that these are questions raised is why i've liked his stuff. even back then, which i did watch on TV back when it was on back in the day
nathan for you went from feb 2013 -> nov 2017. and then nathan kinda disappeared, at least for me personally he did some other work on other people's stuff, but then in 2022, The Rehearsal season 1 came out.
the rehearsal season 1 starts off with a premise: big moments in life are stressful. what if we could rehearse for them? he finds a guy off of craigslist who has a problem: he plays bar trivia with a group of friends for the past ten years. but when they introduced themselves, everyone had advanced degrees. and he felt weird about it, so he just lied and said he had a graduate degree when he never did. it's been eating at him for a decade. he wants to come clean but doesn't know how. nathan shows up at his house and talks to him for a bit about various things. then, nathan asks him if he thinks the conversation went well. he does. nathan then does the big reveal: it's gone well because two weeks ago, he faked the landlord calling in some people to respond to a gas leak. they were actually using laser scanners to scan this guy's apartment. he then created an exact replica of his apartment in a warehouse, hired a guy to pretend to be him, and practiced the conversation over and over. and so that's the idea: they build a copy of the bar in a warehouse, they hire actors to be the bar patrons and staff, they hire an actress to be one of his friends, they practice the interaction over and over, creating a conversation flowchart so he can have options if he wants to change in the moment. the guy agrees. this moment was extra wild for me because I have been to the bar they're talking about. so i am seeing a screen, with a tv show, creating a fake version of a place i have been, in order to practice being at the real place. so it's very visceral how perfect the recreation is. that is what that place is like. it's intense. anyway, i want to keep major spoilers out of all of this because frankly it's a treat to experience but as the show goes on... it starts to fall apart. and go off the rails. an ouroboros. i would say that the show is actually about nathan questioning his own sense of self identity. that's all the closer i think i can get without spoiling things (and happy to discuss spoilers in a thread so nobody else accidentally gets spoiled) it's a very good show. and also very different from nathan for you. but also the same. what is reality? who are we? what does it mean to be human?
in 2023, nathan starts a new show, The Curse. it's on Showtime and Paramount +. unlike the previous shows, which are "reality tv" in some sense, or at least adjacent, the curse is a scripted show. he co-created and wrote it with Benny Safdie, who you may remenber from things like Uncut Gems. they both also play major characters, as does emma stone.
in the show, nathan and emma are a couple who have just landed a show on HGTV. it's called Fliplanthropy, and it's a show about Española, New Mexico. The two of them are trying to help improve the local economy while also building eco-friendly homes. of course, you could also say they're exploiting the fuck out of a small town to make piles of money. but that's not what they're doing, right? they have GOOD intentions, not bad ones! other shows do that, but they're not like them. (bennie is the producer of the show)
anyway... as you might imagine, things get... well the show also changes. here's how wikipedia describes it:
The show deals with subjects such as the artifice of reality television, gentrification, cultural appropriation, white privilege, Native American rights, sustainable capitalism, Judaism, pathological altruism, virtue signalling, marriage, and parenthood.
i have three main things to say about the curse:
- it's beautifully shot. the cinematography really reinforces the storytelling in a way i rarely see on tv.,
- it is wild. because they're also making this show in Española (and santa fe). is making a fake show about exploiting a small town any different than actually doing so?,
- readacted, summary: I found it very emotionally intense and compelling
okay so then finally, just recently: the rehersal season 2 season 2 is almost a different show, while somehow being the same show we're told nathan had taken an interest in airline safety. and that he had thought that he had found a common thread: pilots don't really communicate to each other effectively in moments of crisis. more specifically, first officers sometimes know something is wrong, but don't decisively call out the captain. nathan suspects it's due to a few factors, including a lack of practice he finds a guy who used to run the NTSB, who used to try and tell the government that pilots needed to use roleplay as part of their training to communicate. and nathan says something you alluded to earlier, which is basically like "well i have a background in elaborate roleplay and a giant budget from HBO that's basically like "do whatever you want but it better be humorous"" and so season 2 is simultaneously a very hilarious view on like, human interpersonal interaction, but also a very real campaign to try and draw some government attention onto various issues that pilots face that put passengers in danger
and it's very much not just a bit. like. he's actually surfacing things that pilots talk about amongst themselves all the time as a problem. so. anyway. uh. yeah. season2 finale was friday. and it was just absolutely mindblowing. a few minutes in, there's a title card: "TWO YEARS EARLIER". that's how long he's been working on this season of the show, in a sense. it becomes very obvious that while the events of the show are true, they're also once again constructed and revealed in a manner that creates a gripping story. so like. is that fake, or real? etc etc. im realizing a lot of what i want to say veers into spoiler territory, haha. but anyway, that's my very brief "here's the professional output of nathan summed up" infodump. it is a VERY deep well when you described some of it as "viscerally upsetting," i also 100% get it. i think that's kinda why it's so good honestly but im also happy to talk about that or specific instances and how i feel about them.
there are some really deep uncomfortable themes running through all of this, ESPECIALLY around neurodivergence
you're welcome. i know it's a lot more than you asked, but like, i think that it's important to consider art within context, and his body of work builds on top of each other in ways that make it harder to understand if you don't have cursory knowledge of what he did before. like, the rehersal comes directly out of nathan for you, because he would role-play the ridiculous suggestions before filming, to try and make sure the shooting would go well. it was basically always wrong, and he thought it was really funny that it was so futile to try and control these outcomes. so then, why not make a show about that the additional thing i'll say about the neurodivergence bit is that it's always been an underlying question that's always been dodged UNTIL the last two episodes of season 2 of the rehearsal. in which it is somehow both confronted head-on as well as avoided entirely.