A Beginner’s Guide to Nathan Fielder

Fielder neophytes, gather round. We’re helping you contextualise the comedian’s smash-hit documentary You Can See Everything with this spoiler-free introduction to his career. By Yasmin Omar 

There’s a cohort of people – to whom I proudly belong – who relish the squirming discomfort of engaging with Nathan Fielder’s work. Our ranks are only expanding thanks to his jaw-dropping, brain-scrambling Elizabeth Holmes documentary You Can See Everything, which marks his feature debut.

Co-directed by Primetime’s Lance Oppenheim, it’s a critical darling and commercial juggernaut that has been ecstatically received across the pond and, if Oscar pundits are to be believed, is on track to make history as the first documentary ever nominated for Best Picture. For those unfamiliar with Fielder, don’t fear: here’s what you need to know. 

Dubbed ‘one of the most innovative TV auteurs of the past decade’ by The New Yorker, he is primarily celebrated for (co-)creating three shows: Nathan For You (2013-2017), The Rehearsal (2022-) and The Curse (2023-2024). The first two – hybrids that land somewhere between cringe comedy, documentary and reality TV – stubbornly resist categorisation, while the latter is a scripted drama that is still anything but conventional.

Fielder is an artistic force in front of and behind the camera on each project. His heightened on-screen persona is deliberately awkward, characterised by bone-dry humour; uneasy sustained eye contact; and flat-affect self-deprecation. The ‘Nathan’ he presents on his shows is invariably a beta male desperate for connection – be it platonic, romantic or filial – who fails to achieve it at every turn because of his off-putting personality. This ineptitude is frequently the butt of the joke.

In Nathan For You and The Rehearsal, Fielder casts himself as something of a sociocultural analyst, constructing elaborate experiments to test human behaviours. He seems to execute the show’s stunts, which offer outrageous solutions to simple problems, partly for our entertainment, and partly for his own edification (Fielder repeatedly admits he has trouble interacting with people and is filmed struggling with an autism assessment). 

Nathan For You sends up makeover and self-improvement shows with its premise. A guy with alleged economic savvy (Fielder) advises struggling small businesses on how to improve their sales. The ideas he proposes are, of course, ludicrous. There’s the poo-flavoured frozen yoghurt he innovates because ‘the media responds to controversy’; the auto-repair shop where he urges mechanics to sit polygraph tests to prove they’re not inflating prices; and the hotel he installs with soundproof isolation boxes for children to play inside while their parents are having loud sex. It’s a satirical comedy that thumbs its nose at the absurdities of capitalism. 

Nathan For You mines plenty of laughs from its preposterous scenarios, but it’s more concerned with how its subjects react to them. Through Craigslist ads and local casting, the show assembles dozens of kooks and oddballs, many of whom share extraordinary personal details on camera. The more colourful, attention-seeking characters raise the question: are their intentions for being on TV pure or are they seeking their 15 minutes of fame?

In season one, a petrol-station owner reveals, unprompted, that he drinks his grandson’s urine when he’s scared. (The same is true of The Rehearsal, wherein a sexually threatening pilot breezily admits that he’s been banned from five different dating apps and doesn’t know why.) Fielder is good at judging when to prod and when to stay silent during these moments. 

It must be noted that a number of Nathan For You participants have since blasted the show for being cruel. They weren’t told it was airing on Comedy Central when they signed up, and some felt they were being mocked with these stupid business schemes. (Fielder told New York Magazine he was surprised and upset to hear this, saying, ‘I’m the most pathetic person in everything I do.’)

He’s been compared to the psychologist Stanley Milgram, who’s most famous for running a 1961 obedience study in which a lab-coated experimenter instructs 40 men into delivering what they believed to be electric shocks to someone in the next room. It’s not totally unfounded. Fielder, too, is interested in how ordinary people respond to authority i.e. him as the host and the camera crew around him.   

The Rehearsal grew out of Nathan For You. Before pitching his silly ideas to business owners on camera, he’d roleplay various projected outcomes to get a sense of how to parry them later on. This forms the basis of his ongoing HBO show, which allows members of the public to test out awkward interactions or sample unfamiliar experiences in a controlled environment. Season one begins with pub-quiz enthusiast Kor, who’s apprehensive about telling his trivia team that he lied about having a master’s degree.

To help him confess, Fielder and team recreate the Brooklyn bar he frequents – at great expense, it cost more to replicate the bar than it did to build the real one – and drill Kor over and over so he’s prepared for every eventuality. Nathan sports a bizarre, hands-free laptop harness during these scenes, and inputs all responses into a conversation-guiding flowchart. The show’s central conceit is we all want control over our lives, but can never have it. 

A constant Fielderian preoccupation is the tension between reality and artifice, which is the backbone of the deeply metatextual Rehearsal. Reconstruction, both physical and emotional, is a key tenet of the show. Actors are trained in the ‘Fielder Method’ of secretly observing their ‘primary’ and copying their mannerisms, before being slotted into roleplays. It’s not always clear where reality ends and fiction begins. Therein lies the intrigue – and the ethical dilemma. The season-one finale is a prime example. 

It caps off a months-long rehearsal with fortysomething Angela, who’s been practising motherhood with a revolving cast of child actors alongside Nathan, also curious about becoming a father. Six-year-old, single-parented actor Remy doesn’t understand it was all make-believe, and keeps calling Nathan ‘daddy’ once the job is done, much to the distress of his actual mother. 

The Rehearsal faces the Nathan For You participatory criticisms head on. Who’s responsible? Should children be allowed on (pseudo) reality TV? What safeguarding measures could have prevented this? As usual, Nathan Fielder’s work tends to leave you with more questions than answers.

Which brings us to The Curse. It’s also about the moral dubiousness of controlling the narrative, though this time in a 10-episode, scripted-drama format. Conceived with Benny Safdie (Uncut Gems, 2019), The Curse stars Fielder and Emma Stone as Asher and Whitney Siegel, an unhappily married white-liberal couple seeking to make an HGTV show – about their ‘philanthropic’ eco-homes company in Española, New Mexico – that presents them as community-oriented do-gooders, rather than self-serving gentrifiers.

The distorted reality of reality television, the excruciating interpersonal dynamics, the misguided business ideas… all your Fielder hallmarks are here. The series favours long, languid takes that force you to wallow in the awkwardness, such as when covert narcissist Whitney asks Asher to reenact a rare moment of genuine intimacy for her Instagram with catastrophic results.

In his first dramatic-acting role, Fielder pushes his cuck persona even further: Asher has a micropenis (which is shown!) and cannot fulfil his wife’s sexual or emotional needs. The Curse takes shots at multiple targets, satirising trauma-plumbing art, virtue-signalling allyship and more. Though beloved by critics, audiences largely rejected the show. And who can blame them? Eye-covering cringe comedy is an acquired taste.

As we have explored, there are several throughlines in Fielder’s work: reconstructed reality, artifice-led performance and social discomfort crop up again and again. The whole Nathan Fielder Project is necessarily manipulative, since his shows bend reality through carefully planned recreations. In the words of The Rehearsal’s Angela, who takes a quick dislike to her fellow co-parent, ‘Nathan… likes to manipulate people.’ Will he meet his match in master manipulator, and convicted felon, Elizabeth Holmes? Watch You Can See Everything to find out. 

WATCH YOU CAN SEE EVERYTHING IN CINEMAS