Is there a comedy hall of fame? If so, throw the space dedicated to “Friends” in the garbage and replace it with “Nathan For You,” the most innovative, ahead of its time type of comedy in the last 20 years.
Nathan Fielder graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with superb grades. Now, he is using his knowledge to help struggling small business owners make it in this competitive world. This is the basic premise of “Nathan For You,” as he presents himself as a business expert, then attempts to help them with a totally out-of-the-box idea. Everything Fielder films is real. He is “helping” real businesses and putting their real lives on display.
Fielder himself is a character, but sometimes it is hard to tell where this character ends. He has issues connecting to women and people in general. He is always trying to make friends and just have some human contact. At one point, he tricked a group of women, rented a mansion, hired a host and created a “Bachelor” knock-off called “The Hunk.”
“Nathan For You” is sometimes hard to watch. The amount of awkwardness exerted off screen can only be described as cringe inducing. He is basically lying to all of these people, but it is always a surprise to see how far he takes it. His confidence says he knows what he is doing to help this business, but everything coming out of his mouth says otherwise.
Honestly, Fielder takes these people’s lives and ruins them on national TV.
He creates excessively intricate plans for whichever business he is attempting to help. They are detailed, laid out, and always go way further than they should. He is so dedicated to his show that this is where his character bleeds into his real life.
Season four is the perfect example of Fielder’s commitment to the program. This season, he created a charity that helps people with warts find employment; he developed a sleeper-cell network to infiltrate Uber because of a personal vendetta; he staged the “perfect late night talk show anecdote” that he actually used on “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” before the episode premiered; he also attempted to make smoke detectors the next big jazz instrument. He even married a man and committed fraud in the process.
“Finding Frances” was this season’s two-hour finale and the show’s longest episode to date. It was hyped up by the network and plugged noticeably more than his past finales. In a typical episode, there are a lot of big laughs packed into the half hour, and this finale just feels like an entirely different beast. This was a far more serious endeavor, and although there were laughs, it was obvious Fielder related to Bill Heath, the show’s Bill Gates impersonator from a prior season. Heath was searching for a long-lost love named Frances from over 60 years ago, and Fielder used his show to help him find her.
There is this subtle storyline throughout the seasons that Fielder is a lonely guy that simply cannot relate to people. It makes it seem that he has no chance relating to anybody, and he is forced to confront that in this finale. There were these painful human moments that made viewers occasionally question laughing. The further down this road to find Frances these two traveled, the more Fielder seemed lost in the show.
Nathan Fielder is a genius, pure and simple. He is reminiscent of Andy Kaufman, not in his brand of comedy, but in his dedication to the art. He is doing something nobody else working today is even close to achieving and does not get the recognition he deserves.
Photo: by CleftClips (https://goo.gl/Vsqu2z) via flickr
