Nathan for You

Background

The series centers on Nathan Fielder, portrayed by his real-life namesake, a business graduate and consultant whose aim is to help struggling businesses. His marketing proposals are often outlandish and elaborate. One of the show's long-running story arcs concern Fielder and his social awkwardness. Throughout episodes, his confidence is eroded as his ideas fail. In the show's first season, Fielder is unaware people do not enjoy his company. The character is based in Fielder's real life, and his own struggles with social anxiety; he has noted that he did not want the character to "feel like a comedy character" but one that delivers the "most authentic moments from myself".

The show's central theme is "people and moments between people", designed to "highlight moments of sincere emotion", which include unpredictable reactions.

Production

Nathan for You was created by comedian Nathan Fielder and writer Michael Koman. The show evolved out of segments on the Canadian news satire series This Hour Has 22 Minutes titled "Nathan On Your Side", wherein Fielder played a consumer advocate. The show was greenlit following the cancellation of Jon Benjamin Has a Van, which Fielder also wrote and starred in. Part of the series' inspiration came from Fielder's fascination with the subprime mortgage crisis, and how he found that it was rooted in "these personal moments between people where someone senses something's wrong, but they don't want to speak up".

Marketing ideas are developed in myriad ways; often, Fielder and the writing team will come up with an idea specifically for the business, while other times concepts are formed in a completely unrelated way. Ideas can be thrown out if they are deemed not visually interesting or engaging for viewers. As a result, the show's writing process involves "a lot of guessing and testing", according to Fielder. Episodes are constantly re-written based on the interactions they receive. Sometimes, episodes are shot over the course of six months. Fielder called the show's process "a very inefficient way of making TV".

History

The series premiere garnered 354,000 viewers, improving in its second episode to 570,000. A special Sneak Peek episode that aired on March 13, 2013 after an episode of Workaholics further increased viewership, ending up at 615,000. The following episode, airing on March 14, had 428,000 viewers. The next week on March 21, ratings further took a dip, landing at 394,000 viewers. On April 26, 2013, Comedy Central renewed the series for a second season of 8 episodes. On July 27, 2015 Fielder announced via Twitter that Season 3 would premiere on October 15, 2015. On December 10, 2015, Variety announced that Comedy Central had picked up the show for a fourth season.

Publicity

Several stunts performed for the series have garnered attention from the mainstream media. One in particular occurred even before the series premiered.

Petting Zoo Hero

In the second episode of season one, Fielder and the show's crew attempted to boost the popularity of a California petting zoo by turning one of their pigs into a celebrity through the filming of a hoax video of the pig (actually a trained stand-in pig following a plastic course placed beneath the surface) rescuing a goat who was stuck in a pond. The video, "Pig rescues baby goat" was uploaded to YouTube in September 2012, where it succeeded well beyond the show's expectations, receiving over nine million views and getting played on various national news broadcasts, including the NBC Nightly News. The hoax was finally revealed in February 2013, before the series premiered.

Dumb Starbucks

Over the weekend of February 7, 2014, a coffee shop known as "Dumb Starbucks" opened in Los Feliz. The shop heavily resembled those of the chain Starbucks and used a modified version of its logo, the names of all of its products were prefixed with "Dumb", and the shop also offered CDs of "Dumb Jazz Standards" and "Dumb Nora Jones [sic] Duets". The shop argued that it was actually an art gallery for "legal reasons", because "by adding the word 'dumb' we are technically 'making fun' of Starbucks, which allows us to use their trademarks under a law known as 'fair use.'" After attracting a large lineup of curious attendees over the weekend, it was speculated that the store was a hoax connected to a television program; on the following Monday, a press conference held at Dumb Starbucks revealed that the store was a Nathan for You stunt. Before the stunt was revealed, some attendees thought that the shop had been created by Banksy.

The Movement

Episode three of the show's third season focused on Nathan's attempt to help a struggling moving company by providing the business with free labor. The plan involved the creation and marketing of an original fitness routine called "The Movement", which would emphasize the lifting of household objects (namely boxes and furniture) for exercise, and preclude the need for practitioners to go to a gym or health club. Nathan would then lure interested parties into working for the moving company by leading them to believe they were simply exercising. Marketing for "The Movement" involved a ghost-written book, which subsequently made it on to the Amazon best-seller list, and several television appearances by the "inventor" and public face of the routine, bodybuilder Jack Garbarino.

Other influence

An appearance in the eighth episode of the show's first season by private investigator Brian Wolfe led to Wolfe getting his own reality series on Investigation Discovery, Cry Wolfe. This was referenced on Nathan for You on the eighth episode of the second season, when Nathan tried to get a similar reality TV deal for a security guard who had also appeared in season one.

Reception

Nathan for You has received critical acclaim. Neil Genzlinger of The New York Times dubbed it "the television series with the most incisive take on the 21st-century economy", praising Fielder for "illuminating the relationship between the economy and absurdity". John Thorp of The Guardian called its central conceit "genius", finding it "functions as a razor-sharp satire of commercialism, with a surprising undercurrent of genuine pathos". Willa Paskin of Slate found it "brilliant, fascinating, and uncomfortable".