What’s up, guys?
Helen, here.
If you ask anyone to explain why they love Nathan for You, they’ll probably say some
iteration of “You just have to watch it.”
Nathan Fielder paints a bizarre picture of America, colored by strange individuals ranging
from the verbally abusive private investigator — “You remind me of the wizard of loneliness"
to the ex-con Santa Claus, to the stalkeresque Bill Gates impersonator.
On one level, Nathan’s impossibly complex and nonsensical plans belie analysis, but
as you all already know - that’s not gonna stop us.
Because below all the insanity, the show crackles with brilliant commentary, holding up a mirror
to the absurdity of running a modern business.
Welcome to this Wisecrack Edition on Nathan For You.
And sorta-maybe-kinda spoilers ahead.
Here’s the premise of the show: in your typical episode of Nathan for You, the host
Nathan Fielder introduces us to one or more struggling businesses owners and proposes
a cockamamie plan to improve their luck.
"If Nail let minors purchase alcohol, but then held it in a storage locker until they're
21st birthday, Bouquet Plaza Liquor would gain a ton of new underage customers..."
Then, we watch the plan escalate, deviate, and almost inevitably, fail.
"I think that this mashup of retail and history... it- it is a trainwreck."
On the most basic level, many of the plots Nathan concocts reveal something about the
strained relationship between morality and economic realities.
"You seriously are talking about putting up a banner that says, 'We Sell Liquor To Minors'?"
Nathan has described the way the series was born partially out of his own obsession with
the 2008 economic collapse, in which risky bank behavior took down the global economy.
What really fascinated him was the way this cataclysmic fiscal ratf**k was the result
of thousands and thousands of seemingly mundane moments, like when one guy must have known
that his boss’s credit default swap magic was a bunch of woo-woo bullsh*t.
In nearly every episode of Nathan for You, he makes us live through these kind of sickening
moments after he’s pitched an absurd, and sometimes immoral, idea to a business owner.
"The plan?
Turn the job of moving into America's next fitness craze."
We watch each person reluctantly agree to ideas that will likely mislead, exploit the
labor of, insult, or terrify customers.
"I think you'll get a lot more people if they just think it's a workout, and we don't tell
them that they're actually doing free labor."
There’s the antique store owner who tepidly extends her business hours to lure in drunk
customers who are gonna fall prey to the store’s “You break it, you buy it” policy.”
"I just wouldn’t prefer a broken item.
I’d rather sell a good one, but yeah I mean, it would be the same thing no matter what
happens, so…"
During each of these moments, the owner’s reluctance is palpable, but it's typically
eclipsed by their desire to improve their business— "Mhm." — to please Nathan, — "Probably,
yes, people will think that way." — or, simply, to stay on TV.
"You know, I want to see how it works.
I would love to have this information.
And then, if I have to use, yes, why not using it."
Typically, they'll justify it as a means of achieving bottom line profits.
"Any time we're moving any product, it's always beneficial to the store."
In this subset of Nathan’s pranks, watching decent human beings cajoled into small acts
of immorality ranges from painfully uncomfortable to flat out unbelievable.
"Okay, you know the drill, right?"
"Yeah."
"Blast off!"
Take the time Nathan convinces this man that he’s being hired as a Shell PR representative.
Enticed by the incentive of a good job, the man is willing to say things like this: "This
spill right here.
This spill was, like, relatively small.
If you had to have a spill somewhere, you would want this spill."
Nathan highlights the way a system that emphasizes personal gains at the expense of community
good sets up decent human beings to become their worst selves.
"And these are four people that you cut in front of that you thought you were better
than.
Including a nine-year-old girl."
Part of the strength of Nathan’s satire comes from the fact that each of his ideas
have some real world basis.
He takes business antics that we’re generally pretty comfortable with and transports them
to a place of queasy, moral incongruity.
For example, in the Toy Company episode, he takes a familiar kind of advertising and targets
it towards children - "Owning a doinkit is now the only proof that you are not a baby."
Here, Nathan reveals something uncomfortable about businesses that stealthily exploit our
worst insecurities to get a piece of our hard-earned paycheck.
Nathan for You showcases the struggle of the small business owner trying to compete in
the global economy, subverting the narrative that anyone willing to work hard can simply
“pull themselves up” by their own bootstraps.
Nathan puts his own spin on the American Dream by first giving us the classic protagonist,
a hard-working cab driver or electronics store owner.
He then paints his own presence as the savvy business consultant or the dose of “luck”
they need to revitalize their business.
But the goal isn’t actually to help the businesses
find success, it’s to underscore the absurdity, superficiality, and futility of modern-day
business in the first place.
For instance, even when his scheme to make an elaborately-orchestrated video of a pig
rescuing a goat at a petting zoo go viral actually worked, he perversely left the zoo’s
name out of the video.
"I decided not to put the name of the petting zoo on it.
I didn't want it to come across as an ad."
This “mistake” is a gag that actually gets to the heart of the show’s “mission”
- demonstrating the ultimate futility of Nathan’s “business consulting” efforts.
The short life-span of any viral animal video pretty much ensures the fact that, even if
properly advertised, the petting zoo would have quickly faded back into cultural oblivion.
Nathan just expedited the process.
Even when Nathan’s plans do succeed in the short term, they’re typically too implausible
to survive in the long term.
Though kudos to Ghost Realtor for defying the odds.
Usually, the business owner ends up exactly where they started.
And just maybe, the show is highlighting the impossibility of going up against big business,'even
when your plans are insane and involve alligators.
This is never more clear than when Nathan attempts to take on global brands.
In one episode, he tries to help an electronics store owner compete with Best Buy.
"I mean their sales are ridiculous.
I there's no way I can compete.”
Part of the problem is Best Buy’s Price-Match policy, in which they promise to match any
price from neighboring stores, preventing anyone from underselling them.
Nathan proposes they use Price-Match against the company by offering to sell TVs for $1,
which would allow them to stock up on Best Buy’s entire supply.
As expected, Best Buy finds a way out of it.
“We don’t price match Speers TV."
"Why not?"
"They’re not a local competitor.”
Of course, at the same time that Nathan is trying to use Best Buy’s system to his advantage.
He and the small store owner are going to even more elaborate and absurd lengths to
game their own customers obscuring their $1 TVs with a black tie dress
code and a live alligator.
After a failed lawsuit and a staged reality show, we ultimately hear the message loud
and clear: The international corporations can design rules that plunge small businesses
into financial ruin.
“I’m just so sick and tired of these big companies thinking the rules don’t apply
to them.”
But due to an asymmetry of power, when small businesses try to game them back, they’re
pretty much destined to fail.
In another episode, Nathan tries, unsuccessfully, to take on Uber on behalf of a local cab company.
But by the end of the episode the cab driver ends up becoming, you guessed it, an Uber
driver.
"Why are you doing Uber rides?
You've been doing rides every single day!"
Not content to suggest that the hyper-competitive business climate robs us of our morality and
dooms us all to failure, the show also explores the uncomfortable relationship between modern
business objectives and mortality.
To understand why this matters, we have to examine the ideas of Pulitzer Prize-winning
social theorist Ernst Becker, who saw the motivations behind our desire to acquire money
as, simply put, our futile efforts to escape death.
As he wrote in his book, Escape from Evil, “[money] can be accumulated and passed on,
and so radiates its powers even after one’s death, giving one a semblance of immortality.”
Nathan explores this relationship in several of his episodes, taking the logic of acquisition,
and the narcissism implicit in it, and applies it to the most morbid of possible causes,
the funeral industry.
In one episode, he convinces a funeral home to offer a service in which the unpopularly-dead
can hire actors to attend their funerals so that they appear to be well-liked.
"I think you should give people the option to be family or friends at a funeral."
Funeral actors have made appearances in a variety of cultures new and old, but typically
serve a ceremonial purpose, rather than pose as besties of the recently departed.
This is the ridiculous, albeit logical extension of a consumerist world in which we amass objects
and Instagram likes in order to feel hip, cool and validated.
Buying social capital at your funeral, however, forces us to directly contrast the “acquiring”
of that social capital with the terrifying nature of our: Our mortality.
But there’s more!
In other episodes, Nathan explores the uncomfortable aspects of monetizing death.
He convinces a travel agent who only has very elderly customers to start offering funeral
services to squeeze those customers for every cent before they croak.
He takes a very familiar logic: Diversifying your business - and makes it incredibly eerie
by literally capitalizing off deaths.
By applying a pretty banal business concept to the most ghoulish of circumstances, Nathan
exposes the inherent vulturism sometimes implicit in trying to “upsell” your customers.
Towards the end, Nathan attempts to save on the overhead costs of cremations by testing
out the idea of using a wood-fired pizza oven instead of a crematorium.
One of Nathan’s calling cards by now is his obsession with fine print, surprising
loopholes that only a brilliant weirdo with a Comedy Central budget would have the time
or wherewithal to explore.
An ongoing joke comes in watching Nathan jump through bureaucratic hoops in order to fulfill
a specific mission, such as getting a dive bar classified as a “theatre” in order
to allow indoor smoking.
"Who's to say a bar full of smokers can’t be boundary-pushing theatrical experience
... in the eyes of the law?"
In this way, Nathan exposes the often arbitrary nature of bureaucratic standards,and the ease
with which they can be circumvented or exploited by those with access to the right resources.
In one episode, Nathan attempts to help a shipping company whose main export is smoke
alarms avoid a tariff by convincing the world that the smoke alarm is actually a musical
instrument.
To justify this, Nathan puts together a band in which the smoke alarm was the standout
instrument.
All of Nathan’s antics to underscore the maddening inscrutability of the creation of
these rules rules.
What nightmare confluence of lobbying, local interests, and backroom deals determined why
smoke alarms have higher tariffs than instruments?
-- And why do pesky rules like these ultimately govern our entire lives and economic prospects?
In another tale of loopholes-gone-awry , Nathan attempts to crib one of the most iconic logos
of all time, bringing us the comedic genius of Dumb Starbucks.
In this famous episode, Nathan attempts to help a small cafe capitalize off of Starbucks
trademark by throwing in the moniker “dumb” to claim fair use under parody law.
While he is actually able to pull it off, the Dumb Starbucks experiment is ultimately
shut down for an entirely different bureaucratic reason: Nathan forgot to get a food license.
"The Los Angeles health department shut down Dumb Starbucks today because it did not have
proper permits."
To have him spend the entire episode trying to comply with one loophole only to get shut
down for another technicality actually underscores the sheer exhaustion of attempting to run
a mom ‘and pop operation in a world better suited to Smart Starbucks.
See above, the corporation always wins.
But at the same time, there’s actually a really strange hopefulness and sincerity to
Nathan For You.
Think about it: this is one of very few reality shows in which the people depicted typically
don’t come across as crazed narcissistic jerks.
They’re actually for the most part pretty sympathetic.
The show will often stall on strange moments of humanity even if it’s somewhat disturbing
like the gas station owner’s propensity for drinking his grandson’s urine, — "I'm
promoting because sometimes grandson's pee really helps."
— or the sexually-experimental brothers, "So you guys are brothers?"
"Yes, from Ohio."
"And you have sex with the same girl?" — or the extremely ghost-wary realtor.
Other times, these displays of humanity are just really genuine.
"Roses are red, violets are blue no-one is prettier than you."
The show highlights the tension between those slivers of humanity and the mandates of our
modern economy.
For instance, in one scheme, Nathan sets his production assistant Salomon up on a date,
but agrees to have it sponsored by Quiznos.
So, a Quiznos rep is brought on standby to deliver branded dialogue in real time for
Salomon to say: "Have him say, 'Mmmm, toasty.'"
This is a very self-reflexive critique of the television industry as a whole, which
at the end of the day, only makes money by padding its gripping human dramas and comedies
with commercial breaks every 10 or so minutes.
Furthermore, the show asks, in a world oversaturated with advertising, how can we hope for true
connection?
The show’s best through line explores this question by depicting Nathan’s ongoing quest
to find love and friendship.
Whether Nathan’s forcing an auditioning actress to say “I love you,” — "I love
you."
"Again."
"I love you."
— or asking a shopkeeper if he would like to hang out, only to be rejected.
"Would you wanna hang out sometime socially with me outside of this?"
"No."
Nathan’s antics are hilarious because they’re perfectly calibrated to turn people off.
He’s the king of inopportune hugs and misguided attempts at small talk.
Nathan enjoys letting his genuine vulnerabilities take center stage.
This is never more true than when Nathan treats himself like a struggling business, scheming
to improve his “desirability” as a friend and lover.
He paints himself as “The Hunk” on a made-up dating show.
He also conducts a focus group to improve his likability, and stages an elaborate scientific
experiment to prove that hanging out with him is “fun.”
“So, if their serotonin or dopamine levels go up when they’re hanging out with me,
that would mean that I’m fun."
In treating human interaction like a business, Nathan embodies the loneliness and isolation
of our modern world.
At other times, Nathan actually offers an answer with Strange moments of genuine human
connectedness throughout the series.
Solidarity forms amongst a troop of rebate-seekers who camp out with Nathan on a mountain
and an oddly compelling relationship develops between Nathan and TV’s most lovable sex
worker, Macie.
These interactions are always mediated by money on some level - the rebate seekers are
waiting for Nathan to get them their rebates, and Macie is being paid handsomely to hang
out with him.
But glimmers of true curiosity, affection and shared humanity shine through, and it’s
really beautiful to watch.
It suggests that human connectedness is the balm that can make the current conditions
of the modern world bearable.
Sometimes, Nathan literalizes this thesis by setting the subjects of his failed schemes
up on dates, suggesting that their shitty economic situations could be bearable if only
they had love.
In conclusion, Nathan for You is a giant smirk holding a sign that says “Please love me.”
It explores all the cynical motivations that govern us in this ruthless era of startups
and branded-everything.
And hey- at the end of the day, maybe hanging out with the right group of weirdos could
be just the antidote
you need.
Thanks for
watching everyone!
Peace!