Nathan For You

The "Souvenir Ship" episode that aired this week was the hardest I've laughed at a half-hour show in a very long time, I dunno who else is watching this but it's brilliant. Figure it deserves its own thread to post YouTubes in. If nothing else please watch this clip

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8QruYW6v6E&list=PLD7nPL1U-R5p2A2PNhFaimVdzjIg6CNpI

I loved the gas station rebate episode.

oh my god was the "Chinese Dragon Rentals" part amazing

i watched the entire first season a couple nights ago and it was the best night of my life

ok so caught the starbucks episode purely by chance (was half watching drunk history, didn't turn channel) and it was one of the funniest things i've ever seen on comedy central. i can understand how that ep might be an outlier though. are the other episodes of similar quality? him and that lawyer.

they're basically all good; starbucks ep is middle of the pack imo
johnny depp episode is pretty top level

otm this show is incredibly consistent

I thought the skydiving one was too cringey but other than that every single episode has been hilarious. I agree with forks, that the Depp episode was my favorite so far. But all of them have made me laugh, sometimes it's just the little things that make this show work so well - like "School sucks, man. You can just go on the stinkin' internet!" as Nathan's idea of what teenagers talk about these days

"Claw of Shame" is also amazing and I believe the only other one that's just one long segment. The dude specifically asking not to be credited as a "consultant" (who wound up being credited four seperate times in the end) was probably my favorite part but the whole thing was brilliant.

i love the episodes where he starts with a simple, dumb scheme and consequently builds up an immense and overly complicated series of rube goldbergian plans that move him further and further away from his original purpose
which is most of them

http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/2aoj9b/i_am_nathan_fielder_comedian_director_and_host_of/

Haven't seen any of s2 yet but s1 was amazing. The gas station rebate episode best epitomizes the show's ability to start one place and end up somewhere totally different.

xxp I think most of them do have that potential but he can't control what the business owners will or won't do. The "Ghost Free Homes" lady definitely went all the way with it but there are bits like with the Private Investigator where you can tell things didn't quite go the way he had planned (due to the actor's fiance getting really skeeved out by Nathan). Though that one did have an amazing punchline in the end

His Dan Mintz-like delivery makes me think Tina Belcher is narrating the show, which makes it better.

i so desperately want that banana/tongue out/"I HATE JEWS" photo; someone please post that here when it inevitably shows up on the internet

that was one of the most painful things I've ever seen

death is so saaad
death is so saad

I thought the skydiving one was too cringey but other than that every single episode has been hilarious.

I loved the skydiving episode. "I forgot that I owed my friend forty dollars."

Hard to believe that This Hour Has 22 Minutes wound up fostering anything of worth, but here we are. This show rules.

this was a good episode (and two of the ideas actually seemed legit!) but nothing made me laugh harder than the dog shrieking when Nathan tried to pick it up

well besides the Bill Gates impersonator

"you know... when we made microsoft..."

this guy is just the best

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sL6fco19xXQ

i think the toy store one is my new favorite, just omg the santa reappearance. really amazed at this show's ability to do the same thing over and over again and keep it fresh, improving it even

would really like to see that "i hate jews" picture...

it's in the episode i saw on the comedy central app

i think the one with "the hunk" is my favorite ep, love this guy

http://oi61.tinypic.com/2rgnxxf.jpg

as much as I lost it at the picture, the end of that segment was the first time I genuinely felt the show went too far

that's worse than when he was three seconds away from showing his dick to a crowd of kids?

but that didn't actually happen

thank you, that picture is amazing.
yeah, the bit where the lawyer was getting genuinely indignant was deeply uncomfortable but hey! She posed for the shot!

i kinda assumed 4channers would be all over this show

I can't see this show's title without singing "Nothing on You" by B.o.B.

i always hear flava flav myself

http://assets.adamriff.com/images/woodfellas.jpg

this is the funniest show i've seen in a long time

he has weird hair

my god santa telling those kids they look like babies and the one kid opening up about another kid being mean at school
my god

wait, what episode are you talking about here?

yeah last night was the Taxi/Line Cutting episode. pretty good though the cab company owner's desperation was a little unsettling. I'm glad they didn't go through with it!

oh i am talking about ep8, on the comedy cnetral site. shh never mind it's only a tiny spoiler ;)

did not even realize that the site was ahead of the broadcast schedule! is that normal for cc?

watching this on hulu. they just put the liquor store/exterminator/car wash episode. first two ones were pretty dumb, but the car wash was funny. i think i overdosed on this show "binge watching" the first season.

the lawyer in that dumb starbucks episode trying to steal the signed contract was one of the funniest things i've seen on tv. even if a lot of it was staged or w/e, he does a great job playing with the line between reality tv artifice and the actual, ridiculous things he is doing to/for these businesses

yeah i was curious about to what extent this show is real and found this, which pretty much jibes with my impression:

Many people suspect that reality television is scripted, and with “Nathan for You,” this is, in a sense, the case. Fielder and his writers compose detailed outlines for each episode, trying their best to predict “what a reasonable person might say in a situation,” Fielder said, and to steer events in propitious directions — nudging customers from the gas station, for example, to the mountaintop. This doesn’t mean that the show’s marks are acting, however, or in on the joke: Fielder’s producers approach prospective businesses without letting on that “Nathan for You” is a comedy show, and Fielder never breaks character at a shoot.

In filming the show, Fielder says, chance ultimately rules: “We don’t even reference the script after a certain point. An entire day of shooting will ride on stuff happening the way we hope. It’s crazy to do a production like that, but the uncertainty makes the show feel more authentic and spontaneous.” Koman agreed: “It’s setups and luck.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/15/magazine/nathan-fielder.html?_r=1

if the lawyer wasn't in on it that is like the funniest thing ever

that corkboard thing was one of the funniest moments on the show, my god

"Inside all of our anatomies there's two parts. There's a part that's a liar, and a part that's a cool guy."

dumb Starbucks did not disappoint

i keep thinking there should have been more interesting material there (like how did the employees react to the media blow-up), but if there were, they would have shown it.

This show is the most tortured I've been between thinking it's the funniest thing I've seen in years and thinking he really is possibly an awful person who is blatantly exploiting (at best) unhappy people for a gag (thinking of the repeated cuts at the expense of the lonely guy who allows Nathan to test the 40-maids-in-6-minutes scheme; the woman who says she was assaulted by an 'entity' in Switzerland during the ghost real estate thing; even the lone shot of a woman crying to herself across the pet cemetery when he unveils the advertisement/headstone).

I even felt for all the people who would have been so excited to see the 'Johnny Depp' movie being filmed - though that sequence also had me doubled over in pain from laughing (when he repurposes the footage of the guy running through the souvenir shop as 'people were desperate to get supplies' or whatever I fucking lost it).

He's got to be some kind of sociopath to stand there through these horrible and often quite sad interactions just trusting it'll all wash out in the edit.

also it was nearly 10 years ago?

― Professor Woods and His Blues-singing Dummy (Boring, Maryland), Wednesday, October 21, 2026 10:49 AM (sixteen minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

He has money now, you see

1. Billy sez a bunch of times that they also recorded the interview with the Times reporter, which is a sound practice, but doesn't he say that it's too hard for them to find the relevant passage in which Liz said "they're not portraying me, they're portraying a character THEY created," not "they're not portraying me, they're portraying a character I created"? That's absurd: put that shit up or shut the fuck up, you big dick bitch.

2. I think she is deranged or possibly autistic, as Fielder is. She says that her device will work, and seems to think that this is indivisible from the device working now (or ten years ago). But it is elementary that a device that doesn't work now but might in the future is irrelevant to matter at hand: the device has never worked in our lived experience. Fielder is an effective interviewer (asking "why do you say that?" and "what does that mean?" are almost always surefire methods for revealing statements), but that he didn't pursue her on the difference between the past, present and future when that would seem to be fundamental is a huge missed opportunity.

3, It is somewhat odd that Billy even fucked with her in the first place. He is an amoral ambitious asshole, and if he wants to further those ambitions, hitching his cart to a walking, talking, unblinking symbol of duplicity would seem to be ill advised: no enterprise involving Elizabeth Holmes will ever ever ever get off the ground, maybe some shifty people like the Miami strip club billboard guy will come calling, but no investors worth their salt will ever come within two feet of her. He could have done almost anything else (and clearly was involved in several start ups, received stock options etc etc)…maybe he does love her? I hope he doesn't get gacked out of his gourd around his kids.

3.

also it was nearly 10 years ago?

― Professor Woods and His Blues-singing Dummy (Boring, Maryland), Wednesday, October 21, 2026 10:49 AM (sixteen minutes ago)

He has money now, you see

― Its big ball chunky time (Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved), Wednesday, October 21, 2026 3:07 PM (eighteen minutes ago)

That's not fair, the Instagram reel that was shared includes screenshots of text messages she sent to Oppenheim in 2021, presumably not for the first time.

well if she's a lawyer or has access to lawyers and has been talking about this pre pandemic they would have gotten his ass by now? idk im not here to be captain save an oppenheim but there's not a lot on my care-o-meter to work w here

Fielder is an effective interviewer (asking "why do you say that?" and "what does that mean?" are almost always surefire methods for revealing statements), but that he didn't pursue her on the difference between the past, present and future when that would seem to be fundamental is a huge missed opportunity.

I also wished he'd pointed out that she said outright lies like Johns Hopkins University validated her tech, which they denied; she can't pin that on her audience misunderstanding an ambiguous statements or unique brainwaves. Though perhaps she would just spin some tale that they were denying it to save face or to spite her.

xp Oh I highly doubt anything illegal happened, but I'm open to the possibility that a 21yo documentary filmmaker acted in a way that left his subjects feeling betrayed and exploited

oh sure that happens every time a doc gets made tho

even if it’s all true, I don’t know what we are supposed to do with this information anyway. Start hating “You Can See Everything”? unless it’s addressed to the Oscars nominations committee

given how useless Holmes's responses were to the questions that were included in the doc, I have my suspicions that they didn't want to include an extra hour of her going in circles giving non-answers. I think we can all draw some conclusions

I'm open to the possibility that a 21yo documentary filmmaker acted in a way that left his subjects feeling betrayed and exploited

― Do bench men dream of electric Zoongies? (bernard snowy), Wednesday, October 21, 2026 12:23 PM (seventeen minutes ago)

this is basically the m.o. of the nathan fielder cinematic universe, let's be real here

Given Billy's threats in the film, even before it was over I wondered if there would be any kind of smearing toward Fielder/Oppenheim.

"is Elizabeth Holmes someone who tries to commit fraud and is she antagonistic" is a question that's been answered by many other non-fiction books, documentaries, etc. and I like that YCSE is more of an exploration of what the fuck is going on with these people, as open-ended as that may be

plus you get a little boost every time she says something explicitly wrong like the Johns Hopkins tidbit -- people whispering in the theater or just audibly reacting when the people who have followed the whole thing recognize the lies

this does not, however, include the one group of older people who were five rows behind me clarifying for their elder group member which guy is Billy. I'm guessing they didn't get as much out of it, but who knows

"is Elizabeth Holmes someone who tries to commit fraud and is she antagonistic" is a question that's been answered by many other non-fiction books, documentaries, etc. and I like that YCSE is more of an exploration of what the fuck is going on with these people

otm yeah a lot of my interest in & enjoyment of this doc is bc its not about the specifics of the elizabeth holmes case or nailing her to the wall or like "finally revealed: inside the twisted mind of elizabeth holmes", its about what does it mean to want to see inside someones mind, it could kinda be about anybody

I liked that whenever reality would come in, it'd creep through in the form of one of the passing characters making an offhand remark or, pointedly, the real laser guy (good try with the license plate, Billy) just stating facts only to get shut down. This is not the fact zone, no facts are respected here, vibes only. If anything, it had to be hard to create any semblance of a narrative although I think there's just enough to tie things together, and it's loose enough that it's open to a lot of interpretation on the part of the viewer

Yeah I mean that’s the enjoyable irony of this movie is that Seeing Everything is still meaningless when basic facts, directly from the mouth of Holmes herself, are so malleable & nebulous

Like you could study this movie just on language alone, the way key phrases are used & overused & repeated to become so meaningless that they signify something else entirely… but what? Who is to say.

nothing to see here, folks

Just noticed that YCSE was actually the #1 movie at the US box office on Monday, despite each of the next three screening in more than three times as many theaters.

:D

Liked this piece that basically saw the film and bypassed the film to talk about how prison is a cancer

https://www.bkmag.com/2026/10/21/you-can-see-everything-nathan-fielder-lance-oppenheim-prison-review/

Piece looks interesting. I said something similar to my wife when we were leaving the theater and she said the film was too soft on/sympathetic to Holmes and her family. I know what she means, but I didn't think there was anything unfair or manipulative about the depiction. Prison is an objectively terrible thing that we inflict on convicted criminals. It doesn't make her less of a criminal to acknowledge this reality. We *should* sympathize with her when she is asking the disembodied voice on the other end of the phone "And what exactly does 'invasive cavity search' mean?"

yep

i haven't seen this but i think 'capitalism requires mass delusion and punishes internally only when convenient" would be a more interesting treatment than the particulars of the grifter personality.

^^^ yeah I’ve been musing why did Holmes go down but Vivek Ramaswamy did similar stuff and is a free man

also complicated by the fact that her and billy are openly planning to basically commit the same crime again right up until the literal moment she walks through the prison gates

Saw that Ghislaine Maxwell is in that same Bryan Federal Prison Camp and then found this NPR story from last year on it.

Finally saw this last night. I'd love an exact accounting of their pets and what was going on with that snake.

The guy from Girls was not a bad choice for Billy reenactments, but it's too bad they didn't get Bradley Cooper.

Christopher Abbott also played Seyfried's husband in The Testament of Ann Lee.

christopher abbott was a great casting but something about billy evans made me think of zach woods and the characters he plays. anyone else feel that?

resemblance is not super strong but with curly hair and a beard it could work

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Zach_Woods_at_Tribeca_Film_Festival_2026-10_%28cropped%29.jpg

https://image.tmdb.org/t/p/w342/bw36NidqSs2kkUCmyzKYfsYVV6l.jpg

good casting, might come off as too comedic. if anyone wanted to do a broader comedy that played some of the facts as a farce then Zach would be the mvp

yeah i dont think zach woods has the right menace

TJ Miller, on the other hand...

i had the other guy from Girls in my head as Billy

adam driver? andrew rannells?

karpovsky

Abbott kind of added an understated menace because I mostly think of him as the guy from Possessor (creepy Brandon Cronenberg flick), Black Bear, and that bdsm one, Sanctuary. he didn’t have much to do here but be vaguely present and menacing

I guess he’s Professor X next so 🤷

It's been sort of bugging me that some of the reviews I've read call this "nihilistic." I sort of get that, but I can't agree. It's cynical, sure. Skeptical--without a doubt. But neither of those qualities equal nihilism. There's a lot of ideas to take away from this film, but "nothing matters" isn't one of them, IMO.

At one point, Nathan warns Amanda, "don't get taken in," and it feels every bit a reminder to himself. That he himself *does* get (sort of) taken in doesn't render his effort to be objective meaningless. It just shows that the effort is inherently fraught, because everyone involved is human. Like, at no point did I feel like the movie was saying that we are epistemologically helpless in the face of charismatic bullshitters.

ilx, is this a nihilistic movie??

i think "nihilistic" is one of those words normies misused as a synonym for 'bleak', which is of course...wrong.

looking forward to seeing this.

so weird to see this now after she's already returned from jail and is using her real voice instead of the fake baritone now.

does she use the deep voice in this doc?

To be fair, the main review I was thinking of was a lengthy, heady, letterboxd review that was far from "normie," by a guy named Julian Towers, who seems like a smart dude! But he wrote it was "basically useless as anything but a jumping-off point for nihilism" and that made me think "really??"

The voice is her "real" voice I think, which honestly doesn't sound that different from the infamous baritone.

She's still in jail afaik

She is extremely still in jail and is not eligible for probation

she gets released to a halfway house next summer

That’s not probation tho? I thought she cant get probation under federal law

dang, this is playing in Tupelo MS, first documentary at the Malco or Cinemark I can recall in maybe ever

saddened to have learned the "billy" being referred to itt isn't the fyre festival guy

apparently billy's last job was at a lidar company that was trying to break into the autonomous car space

Oh, Armond!

I had to tap out after the first paragraph. You’ve got to weave that shit into the rest of the screed, Armond