Reaching for connection in 'Nathan For You'
Nathan For You is a show that blurs the line between artifice and reality. Creator and star Nathan Fielder plays a fictionalized version of himself, and it's never fully clear whether the people he meets are in on the joke or not. Some of his schemes, like viral video 'Pig rescues baby goat' and Dumb Starbucks, attracted wide mainstream attention before they appeared on Nathan For You. It's a fake reality show that is also... a real one? (It's confusing, I know, but that's part of what makes it so good.)
While it's funny to see how the stuff he cooks up bleeds into the real world, the real genius of this ambiguity comes from the central figure of Nathan himself. Throughout the show, Nathan repeatedly leverages the TV show format to affirm both himself and his connections to other people. However, in a sadly comical sort of way, it is always undercut by the larger artifice. He uses the power and societal pressure afforded by having his own TV show to get the validation he so desperately needs, but how real is that validation if he didn't come by it honestly? And yet, how could he get it otherwise? This central idea makes Nathan For You fascinating to watch - while also being one of the funniest shows ever made.
It's hard to pinpoint exactly what the genius of Nathan For You is. It would be easy to write it off as just cringe comedy, but that seems reductive. My current working theory is that the show excels because every complicated scheme Nathan comes up with is just a way of fulfilling his real goal: forming connections with people. He cares about others, and desperately wants them to care about him, too. Though many of his plans end up straying from their original purpose, Nathan gets fully invested in every business he encounters (even if the people he's helping don't care nearly as much). Some of the best schemes on the show start off fairly simple and quickly escalate into sprawling, layered machinations.
The convolution never feels arbitrary, though, because Nathan takes it all so seriously. He often gets caught up in the narratives he creates for himself, saying incomprehensibly brilliant stuff like "they say that the Devil is an artist, and if that's so, then maybe I was his greatest piece yet" when his parody of Starbucks gets shut down for a health code violation. (Sidenote: great line, I think about it all the time.) Nathan wants so badly to think of himself as fulfilling some purpose greater than literally just helping small businesses make more profit, and he wants everyone else to care about this imagined purpose as much as he does, but they don't. It just makes him a more lonesome figure than ever.
Sure, it's pretty difficult not to cringe away whenever Nathan lets himself be vulnerable and attempts to bypass the artifice of TV to make a real connection. But that reaction usually isn't because of a deliberately uncomfortable yet appropriately zany situation, the way it might be in another show - it's more because in these moments, Nathan embodies such a stark loneliness and unreciprocated longing that it makes us recoil. It quickly becomes apparent that everyone Nathan meets only sticks around because he's paying them, or because they feel obligated to do it for the TV show, and he'll never be able to parlay that into genuine friendship. Whenever someone rejects his offer to hang out off-camera (this happens often), you feel for him as much as you laugh at him.
You really can't blame Nathan for orchestrating these complex situations wherein he gets to be the hero and people applaud him for it (at least, that's how it's supposed to happen - it rarely ever does). Despite everything, he still manages to find moments of connection here and there, even if they're pretty one-sided. He gets choked up when an actress says "I love you" to him over and over again to prove her acting mettle, and smiles beatifically after he tricks a man into marrying him in a Chinese restaurant for legal protection (yes, this is a real scene). It's kind of sweet, because Nathan doesn't want admiration to pad his ego or anything - he just really, truly wants to be liked. And he'll take that any way he can get it, even if it means paying people absurd amounts of money.
In these moments, you also want to believe that the TV show has nothing to do with it, and that people genuinely do want him around. There's something touching about how much he cares about people who clearly just see him as some guy with a camera crew. It's also incredibly funny. Nathan is just a lonely person using the considerable resources of a TV show to make people like him. Who among us hasn't been there, right?
