i haven’t watched full episodes yet, but after watching clips of ‘how to with john wilson’ i think it captures a lot of what is appealing about nathan fielder’s show without the more mean spirited or like trickstery aspects that make nathan for you kind of hard to deal with.
the reason i like nathan fielder but also can’t really deal with the show, is he basically seems like the apex version of a lot of guys i knew in hs and especially university, where it just seems like they are constantly living inside of an inside joke that only they understand.
like i knew a guy who would only ever talk about this elaborate idea he had for a movie that was just about pterodactyls eating people, and it was impossible to tell if this is sincerely what his ambition was as a filmmaker or if he was just being ironic? or another person i knew who was actually twins, but the two twins would just trade places for the day without telling anyone what they were doing.
nathan for you is basically the show that i think every one of these people would try to make if given unlimited resources, but i think most of them just ended up going into super normal careers but probably living their entire lives maintaining that sense of ineffable ironic detachment. so i admire his committment to actually becoming a celebrity off that vibe.
Hah, that’s such a perfect description of the guy’s persona.
I’ll second How To With John Wilson. It does hit the same appeal without so much cruelty. Like Fielder, Wilson shows up in odd places and messes with weirdos, but instead of interfering with their lives in bizarre and cruel ways, he instead just tries to cloak his detachment and fit in with their milieu while introducing strangeness that reflects back on him rather than victimizing them. For the most part, he’s not making the people around him especially uncomfortable in the moment. Though admittedly he is definitely mocking some of these folks (like the Mandela Effect people or the circumcision guy), it’s a bit more good-natured.
I’m excited for season 2! I know someone who went to a private premiere of the first episode and he said it was great.
Both shows border between “ethically ambiguous” and “ethically compromised” but at least Nathan Fielder is upfront with his subjects that they are being filmed for a TV show. Describing How to With John Wilson as “messing with weirdos” is really disingenuous, a huge portion of the show is John surreptitiously filming people. Many of these people are captured during pretty personal or compromising moments (e.g couples having a fight, EMTs accidentally dropping a body down stairs). It’s unclear if he gets permission from each and every person.
That’s a great point. It’s been a little while since I watched the series, so I wasn’t thinking about all of the footage he gets of passers by. That definitely enters some thorny territory that Nathan For You doesn’t really touch. In my own defense, I wasn’t being disingenuous, just forgetful. As a documentary filmmaker myself, I take documentary ethics very seriously and avoid this kind of thing in my own work.
you don’t need to get permission to film people in NYC (this is not saying i agree with the practice), so it’s likely that at least some of this stuff is not signed off on
edit: although he does sometimes blur people’s faces, so whether that’s an implication of lack of consent from that individual or a narrative choice, idk
that said
fourth-wall-breaking spoilers have been hidden
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something i learned this past summer (which i don’t think is meant to be “known”) is that a lot of this footage is uh…staged. not real.
i don’t know the exact percentage of how much is staged, but i think it’s safe to say that the show’s storyline and arc is more crafted than the show itself lets on. my assumption is that the wilder things we see feature actors (this also explains why several people i know who are friends with John appear throughout the series in the interstitial “people on the street” footage)
this kyle mooney/scott gairdner/ben jones show is not even giving me nostalgia for the time period it’s parodying it’s giving me like 2010 internet nostalgia?
No offense to Gen X / geriatric millennials but I am far beyond my tolerance for being exposed to all the funny flaws of ur children’s media. I have never seen an episode of GI JOE & yet, it is as if I have seen a million.
One weird thing about Nathan Fielder that I never see talked about is how (in the first two seasons I watched at least) all of the “subjects” seem to be non-native English speakers or immigrants. I get the defense of the show a lot of people fall back on is that the joke is ultimately on Fielder most of the time but it still left a bad taste in my mouth, but as someone who lived abroad for a decade and absolutely takes everything in a second language as too literal which would have opened me up to getting conned maybe I’m just being overly sensitive, I can’t tell.
and like, there’s something there, immigrants tend proportionally to reproduce the dumbest structures of the marketplace without complaint because they are disempowered and it is not in their interests to be critical, but his approach to that still puts a bad taste in my mouth 60% of the time
That’s a great point, I was focused on the language aspect of it (all the times I went along with shit I didn’t care about/want to do just because I wanted to participate in society and didn’t realize/care I was getting played, though I was an a place of comfort financially so I had the luxury not to really worry about it too much) but a read from a place of economic disenfranchisement to ask why they engage so uncritically makes even more sense.
I also think it’s weird that this major through line of Nathan for you never seems to get mentioned in any discussions about the show.
