Nathan Fielder’s consultant with really good grades takes real schemes to real shopkeepers, and the results are funnier than a prank show has any business being. Stick with it past a patchy first season: the last episode is the strangest and saddest thing here.
Nathan Fielder plays a man called Nathan Fielder who has come to help. He tells us, at the top of every episode, that he graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades, and he walks into real shops in Los Angeles and offers their owners a plan. The owners are real. The plans are terrible, and they are carried out anyway, on camera. Nathan for You ran for four seasons and 31 episodes between February 2013 and 2017, and it is the funniest thing we have seen built out of other people’s embarrassment. We recommend it warmly, with the warning that the first season takes a few episodes to find its feet.
The shape barely changes. Fielder sits across a table from a shopkeeper, draws the scheme on a whiteboard and waits. A frozen yoghurt shop is given a poo-flavoured yoghurt, in the hope the press will come. A petting zoo is given a pig that rescues a drowning goat, and the film of it goes round the world before anyone knows it was staged. A petrol station offers a rebate that can only be claimed on foot, at the top of a mountain, overnight. The owners agree because a camera is pointing at them and saying no would be rude. Each episode runs 21 minutes.
It is shot and cut to look like the business-makeover programmes it is mocking: clean interviews against shop shelves, graphics that pop up to explain the plan, a soft bed of corporate guitar under Fielder’s narration, which never rises above the tone of a man reading a fire-safety notice. Tim Banning is the credited director and writer; Fielder created the series with Michael Koman, and Clark Reinking and David Paige produce. The important decision was not to cut. When a shopkeeper hears the plan and stops talking, the camera stays on him two seconds longer than television usually allows, and that is where the comedy is.
Fielder is the joke, and he knows it. His consultant is a lonely man who has mistaken commerce for friendship. He keeps a straight face while a Johnny Depp impersonator (Ronnie Rodriguez) does his bit, and while a retired judicial commissioner (Anthony Filosa) is consulted in earnest. More than once we laughed out loud at a shop owner’s face and then felt slightly ashamed, because the face was real and its owner was only trying to be polite. It was the silence that did it. Fielder never rescues the pause, so the person opposite has to decide, live, whether to be kind. Mostly they are.
It gets bigger as it goes. The second season opens a coffee shop called Dumb Starbucks, logo and all, and lets the queue form while lawyers are consulted. The third ends with “The Hero”, in which Fielder spends weeks preparing an ordinary man for a stunt, and the joke grows a heart it did not need. The fourth ends with an episode we will not describe. We sat through it barely laughing and did not mind, and it moved us more than a series about poo yoghurt had any right to. Fielder had spent thirty episodes teaching us to watch faces, and by then we could not stop.
It is not all of a piece. The pilot is the weakest episode; the one negative review we read judged it alone, called the material thin and the jokes low, and on the pilot alone we would not argue hard. A handful of early episodes are a single idea walked to its end with nothing else on board. Some of the people caught out are not shopkeepers who signed a form but passers-by and hired hands, and using them and moving on sits less comfortably the longer you watch. And 31 episodes of the same conference room is a lot of conference room.
Of the prank shows it grew out of, this is the one that noticed the people were people. Watch it in order, two episodes a night, and do not skip ahead to the ending. The last episode only works on someone who has spent thirty episodes with this man.
