"If you were in Los Feliz in early 2017, you may have noticed a “Dumb” Starbucks, with the same drinks (but dumb), and the same decor (but dumb). Maybe you got gas in Burbank, but could only fill up your car after climbing a mountain and battling an alligator. Maybe, you were in Oregon and found a house that seemed totally normal, except with cameras everywhere, and freshly “grown” crops with grocery store stickers still attached. This is all the work of one man, Nathan Fielder, and the character he’s been playing for 15 years." -- Phineas Hildreth, 9th grade
Fielder’s first major role was on 2008’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, as a correspondent with an interview segment that often ended in discomfort and awkwardness. Appearing in 9 episodes he then moved on to various guest roles on shows like Bob’s Burgers, Drunk History, and The Simpsons. After his stint on "This Hour Has 22 Minutes,”, Fielder continued to explore his awkward comedic character. His Comedy Central show, "Nathan For You," which premiered in 2013, was a perfect platform for him to showcase his distinct approach to humor. The show presented itself as a serious business advice program and used real people and businesses. Nathan would visit struggling small businesses and propose outlandish, absurd solutions to their problems. Although it could be so over the top and stupid Nathan kept his dead serious character the whole time, whether it be during high-stakes handcuff escapes or a haunted house where customers are tricked into thinking they contracted a rare horrible disease. But for as hilarious as the show can be there are moments in the show that hint at something much deeper. As a private investigator he hired one episode said, Fielder is a sort of “wizard of loneliness”.
The peak of the show's exploration of this comes in the brilliant series finale “Finding Frances”. The feature-length episode follows a Bill Gates impersonator’s quest to find his long-lost love, Frances. Seemingly a noble goal at first the film takes a darker turn as more is discovered about Bill’s history with Frances. Despite his misgivings, Nathan continues to help him. There are a lot of schemes and investigations but after a very long search, they can’t track her down. Watching this sad lonely old man seems to freak Nathan out. As part of his plan to get Bill ready for love again he hires an escort to meet with him but Bill rejects it, instead of moving on Nathan spends time with her. Nothing explicit happens, they don’t even kiss, yet he pays for her again and again. Nathan is willing to pay thousands of dollars just to talk to someone for a fake relationship.
Towards the end of the film when Nathan successfully locates Frances he wants to make sure Bill is ready. He builds a living room set with a front door and hires an actress to pretend to be Frances. Bill rehearses knocking at the door and greeting her and is incredibly inappropriate with her at first. He tries to get Bill to understand how Frances would feel about this but it only works once he decides Bill should instead act as Frances and try to think like her while the actress recreates what he was doing to her. He never ends up meeting with Frances, although he does call her while sitting in his car outside her house. After the attempted meet the show ends with Nathan meeting up with the escort from earlier one more time. They seem to have a genuine connection and Nathan confesses to her that he loves her. In a voiceover, he says “The more we kept shooting things, the harder it was to tell where the show ended and life began,”. She responds nicely but asks about the cameras, he offers to turn them off but she responds “You’re filming something. It’s kind of the purpose, right?”. Nathan thinks for a second and then tells the crew they could get a cool shot with the drone they have. They get the show and in it, we see Nathan and Maci, and as it zooms out we see the full production crew around them. It’s bleak, we’re left wondering how much of what Nathan said is real if he’s wondering the same. He’s fully given himself to the show and can’t bring himself to turn off the cameras for a real connection with someone.
This idea became the foundation of his next show The Rehearsal. The show follows him helping people again but in a different way, offering people a chance to rehearse important upcoming moments in their lives with professional actors and sets. In the pilot, he perfectly recreates an entire bar and hires actors to covertly study the behavior of a man’s friend to whom he needs to confess something. After this episode, the show takes a huge left turn and instead focuses on Nathan rehearsing for having a family with Angela. They have some differences, she’s an incredibly devout Christian who almost exclusively talks about Jesus and he’s Jewish, and their personalities aren’t the most alike but they try to make it work. Due to child labor laws, the actors playing the fake baby have to be swapped out every 3 hours but to make it feel more real, the crew swaps the babies when Nathan and Angela aren’t looking.
The child, unsubtly named Adam, grows older and Nathan and Angela rehearse their family life 24/7, but Nathan finds some time during the day to take on other people who need rehearsals. In the show’s fourth episode he takes a trip to Los Angeles to mentor actors in the ways of his new “Fielder method” he’s developed while working on the show. He has everyone in his class find a stranger to observe and try to copy their behavior. After everyone has found their subject he arranges for them to live a day in the life of their subject. He starts to worry people in the class find him odd though, and to gain perspective he takes the place of a student and hires actors to observe and play the other students and even gets an actor to play him teaching the class. One day while the student he’s replacing is replacing his subject Nathan offers to house-sit for the night and water his plants. Once he gets a key he sleeps over and acts as if it’s his house for a night without the guy knowing.
At this point, he’s deep into an elaborate web of actors playing actors playing actors. He realizes he’s lost sight of actually preparing for family life. He was more focused on the making of the show than what the point of the show was and he decides to restart. After returning from the trip he speeds up the pace, having Adam age into a teenager who starts lashing out and resenting his father for not focusing on him and leaving for so long. The episode ends on an incredibly depressing note with Adam overdosing and dying.
With some major tonal whiplash, the next episode opens on another rehearsed version of Adam, who’s once again a 6-year-old, having fun playing with Nathan and dressed up as “Dr. Farts”. This penultimate episode is reminiscent of the first few episodes, more lighthearted and focused on the day to day family life. Toward the end we see Nathan discussing the whole ordeal with Angela, who questions the ethics of it all and after a heated debate asks “Do you want to feel something real? Because no matter how hard you try you never will”. With Nathan at a loss for words, it’s revealed that it was a rehearsal for his real conversation with Angela, and in reality, she just politely said she wanted to leave the show.
In the finale, with Angela gone, we see him grappling with if what he’s done is right. For so long he’d been manipulating and lying to everyone around him for his own needs and now he learns the child actor who’d played Adam doesn’t have a father in his life and is incredibly distraught to leave the show. He thought of Nathan as a dad and now can’t move on. Ending on a cliffhanger, Nathan tries to right his wrongs, rehearsing over and over trying to see if he could’ve prevented it. He decides to act as the child actor's mom and get another actor to play her son. In the final scene, we see Nathan fully expressing emotion for the first time, breaking down in tears apologizing as the kid's mom, and explaining that everything will be alright, but ends by saying “It’s okay if you get confused. It’s okay if you get sad. Because no matter what you experience, we have each other,” Nathan continues. “And I’m always gonna be here for you, because I’m your dad.”
“Wait, I thought you were my mom,” the actor whispers to him, breaking character.
“No,” Nathan responds in an almost sinister tone. “I’m your dad.” Roll credits.
It’s a bleak ending, Nathan once more in a rare moment of feeling something real hides from it by going deeper and deeper into hiding himself in his show. He’s using the awkward comedic character he created based on his own awkwardness and insecurity to explore why he does TV. With season 2 of the rehearsal on the way and his new show, The Curse, premiering next month, Nathan seems to continue exploring this idea of hiding from reality in entertainment.
The peak of the show's exploration of this comes in the brilliant series finale “Finding Frances”. The feature-length episode follows a Bill Gates impersonator’s quest to find his long-lost love, Frances. Seemingly a noble goal at first the film takes a darker turn as more is discovered about Bill’s history with Frances. Despite his misgivings, Nathan continues to help him. There are a lot of schemes and investigations but after a very long search, they can’t track her down. Watching this sad lonely old man seems to freak Nathan out. As part of his plan to get Bill ready for love again he hires an escort to meet with him but Bill rejects it, instead of moving on Nathan spends time with her. Nothing explicit happens, they don’t even kiss, yet he pays for her again and again. Nathan is willing to pay thousands of dollars just to talk to someone for a fake relationship.
Towards the end of the film when Nathan successfully locates Frances he wants to make sure Bill is ready. He builds a living room set with a front door and hires an actress to pretend to be Frances. Bill rehearses knocking at the door and greeting her and is incredibly inappropriate with her at first. He tries to get Bill to understand how Frances would feel about this but it only works once he decides Bill should instead act as Frances and try to think like her while the actress recreates what he was doing to her. He never ends up meeting with Frances, although he does call her while sitting in his car outside her house. After the attempted meet the show ends with Nathan meeting up with the escort from earlier one more time. They seem to have a genuine connection and Nathan confesses to her that he loves her. In a voiceover, he says “The more we kept shooting things, the harder it was to tell where the show ended and life began,”. She responds nicely but asks about the cameras, he offers to turn them off but she responds “You’re filming something. It’s kind of the purpose, right?”. Nathan thinks for a second and then tells the crew they could get a cool shot with the drone they have. They get the show and in it, we see Nathan and Maci, and as it zooms out we see the full production crew around them. It’s bleak, we’re left wondering how much of what Nathan said is real if he’s wondering the same. He’s fully given himself to the show and can’t bring himself to turn off the cameras for a real connection with someone.
This idea became the foundation of his next show The Rehearsal. The show follows him helping people again but in a different way, offering people a chance to rehearse important upcoming moments in their lives with professional actors and sets. In the pilot, he perfectly recreates an entire bar and hires actors to covertly study the behavior of a man’s friend to whom he needs to confess something. After this episode, the show takes a huge left turn and instead focuses on Nathan rehearsing for having a family with Angela. They have some differences, she’s an incredibly devout Christian who almost exclusively talks about Jesus and he’s Jewish, and their personalities aren’t the most alike but they try to make it work. Due to child labor laws, the actors playing the fake baby have to be swapped out every 3 hours but to make it feel more real, the crew swaps the babies when Nathan and Angela aren’t looking.
The child, unsubtly named Adam, grows older and Nathan and Angela rehearse their family life 24/7, but Nathan finds some time during the day to take on other people who need rehearsals. In the show’s fourth episode he takes a trip to Los Angeles to mentor actors in the ways of his new “Fielder method” he’s developed while working on the show. He has everyone in his class find a stranger to observe and try to copy their behavior. After everyone has found their subject he arranges for them to live a day in the life of their subject. He starts to worry people in the class find him odd though, and to gain perspective he takes the place of a student and hires actors to observe and play the other students and even gets an actor to play him teaching the class. One day while the student he’s replacing is replacing his subject Nathan offers to house-sit for the night and water his plants. Once he gets a key he sleeps over and acts as if it’s his house for a night without the guy knowing.
At this point, he’s deep into an elaborate web of actors playing actors playing actors. He realizes he’s lost sight of actually preparing for family life. He was more focused on the making of the show than what the point of the show was and he decides to restart. After returning from the trip he speeds up the pace, having Adam age into a teenager who starts lashing out and resenting his father for not focusing on him and leaving for so long. The episode ends on an incredibly depressing note with Adam overdosing and dying.
With some major tonal whiplash, the next episode opens on another rehearsed version of Adam, who’s once again a 6-year-old, having fun playing with Nathan and dressed up as “Dr. Farts”. This penultimate episode is reminiscent of the first few episodes, more lighthearted and focused on the day to day family life. Toward the end we see Nathan discussing the whole ordeal with Angela, who questions the ethics of it all and after a heated debate asks “Do you want to feel something real? Because no matter how hard you try you never will”. With Nathan at a loss for words, it’s revealed that it was a rehearsal for his real conversation with Angela, and in reality, she just politely said she wanted to leave the show.
In the finale, with Angela gone, we see him grappling with if what he’s done is right. For so long he’d been manipulating and lying to everyone around him for his own needs and now he learns the child actor who’d played Adam doesn’t have a father in his life and is incredibly distraught to leave the show. He thought of Nathan as a dad and now can’t move on. Ending on a cliffhanger, Nathan tries to right his wrongs, rehearsing over and over trying to see if he could’ve prevented it. He decides to act as the child actor's mom and get another actor to play her son. In the final scene, we see Nathan fully expressing emotion for the first time, breaking down in tears apologizing as the kid's mom, and explaining that everything will be alright, but ends by saying “It’s okay if you get confused. It’s okay if you get sad. Because no matter what you experience, we have each other,” Nathan continues. “And I’m always gonna be here for you, because I’m your dad.”
“Wait, I thought you were my mom,” the actor whispers to him, breaking character.
“No,” Nathan responds in an almost sinister tone. “I’m your dad.” Roll credits.
It’s a bleak ending, Nathan once more in a rare moment of feeling something real hides from it by going deeper and deeper into hiding himself in his show. He’s using the awkward comedic character he created based on his own awkwardness and insecurity to explore why he does TV. With season 2 of the rehearsal on the way and his new show, The Curse, premiering next month, Nathan seems to continue exploring this idea of hiding from reality in entertainment.