Nathan For You Blends Reality And Fantasy Unlike Any Other Show (Copy)
If you’re going to binge a show, it’s this one.
Mike O’Connor is the best O’Connor in basketball writing. Previously of The Athletic, you can find Mike on Twitter @MOConnor_NBA.
If you haven’t seen Nathan for You, here’s the quickest summary I can give: a seemingly dull and unassuming man gives completely insane advice to small business under the guise of a documentary.
On the surface, it sounds simple -- a bunch of fun practical jokes on unwitting small business owners. But I promise you, the show is a million times more intricate than that. Nathan Fielder is an ingenious, diabolical puppet master who uses each episode to create a bunch of intersecting fantasy worlds that should never have existed.
Throughout the show, Nathan goes to incomprehensible lengths to create any fake reality that he needs to in order to achieve his goal. And what’s most amusing about these bizarre fake realities is how much of a dent they often leave in, well, actual reality. A quest to help a moving company results in a lie-filled best selling book and a national news story. An attempt to help a coffee shop results in an international news story and a controversy surrounding parody law. An attempt to help a struggling cab driver results in Nathan marrying the cab driver, without the cab driver even knowing.
These unbelievable dents in reality are achieved through simply building one unfathomable lie on top of another until they hit a boiling point. Perhaps the best example of how these lies cross over into reality is the episode “The Anecdote,” which really encapsulates the theme of the show. In the leadup to a real, actual appearance on Jimmy Kimmel, Nathan decides that he needs a funny anecdote to share during his chat with Kimmel. In search of the perfect story to tell, Nathan comes up with a tale in which he flies to an out of town wedding, gets his suitcase mixed up with another person, wears said person’s suit to the wedding, notices a baggy with a powder substance in the pocket, gets pulled over by the police en route to the wedding, and as the cop suspects the baggy to have drugs, they are forced to call the man to find out that they were his mother’s ashes.
After deciding that this is his ideal anecdote, rather than simply lying about it, Nathan goes about turning the story into reality. He convinces two strangers to invite him to their out of town wedding, hires a man to take the same flight and intentionally mix up their suitcases, convinces the man to put his mother’s ashes in his suit pocket, and then hires a police officer to pull him over and read lines from a paper to create the interaction Nathan envisioned. So, the story that he tells on Kimmel is both completely made up and 100 percent true.
Time and again, reality and non-reality blend together on the show. In the episode “Smokers Allowed” in which Nathan meets with a struggling bar owner, Nathan discovers a legal loophole that allows people to smoke indoors so long as it is part of a theatrical production. After inviting two women to watch what they think is a genuine theatrical production, Nathan convinces the bar to allow smokers in for the evening. The bar goers smoke away, enjoying their night out while not suspecting anything, while two women watch on from their chairs, believing they are watching a play.
In each episode, what starts as an attempt to help a business becomes an interconnected house of cards that exists in a reality of its own, with people assuming roles that they are hardly aware of simply to live out Nathan’s bizarre will.
Perhaps just as impressive as dreaming up these outlandish realities is Nathan’s ability to convince the businesses and all other involved parties to go along with his plans -- the show is an incredible display of how willing people are to accept and believe total bullshit if it comes in the right package. Nathan, on the surface, seems about as unthreatening and unassuming a person as you can find -- his persona on the show is comically dull, to the point that half of an episode (“Fun”) is entirely devoted Nathan attempting to definitively prove that he can be a fun person to be around.
His bland, deadpan persona is the perfect way to package the complete bullshit that he feeds to his “clients.” His suggestions seem completely inane on the surface -- to the point that it should clearly raise the antennas of any logical person. But his demeanor kills those concerns on arrival. He presents himself as a person incapable of even seeing the humor in his stunts, and expresses genuine dismay when his suggestions are questioned.
In a way, Nathan toys with the very fabric that holds society together. In any functioning society, we generally need to assume that the person in front of us is operating under genuine pretenses. That the pizza delivery man is indeed delivering a pizza. That the realtor is indeed trying to sell us a home. That the reality show consultant is indeed here to help our small business. Because of this, despite all empirical evidence suggesting that Nathan is either insane, manipulative, or both, the people around him can’t help but go along with his antics, as his unflinching demeanor disarms people’s concerns and sets them back to their default assumption -- that he is truly there to help.
If you haven’t yet watched Nathan for You, I highly recommend it. It will make you question whether it really matters what’s real and what’s fake, and will make you re-examine the assumptions we make about one another each day. You will take a trip through the mind of an insane person who shows just how easily people can be manipulated into fulfilling a particular purpose, no matter how insane or unnecessary. It is a modern day masterpiece.