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!
