After behind-the-scenes stints on Sacha Baron Cohen’s Who Is America? and the innovative How To With John Wilson, Nathan Fielder has once again returned to our screens for The Rehearsal, a six-episode HBO series, which began on July 15th. On such an occasion, it is worth it yet again to consider the subversive brilliance of Fielder’s mock-doc comedy series Nathan For You, in which Fielder played a version of himself, intervening in the lives of real businesses with outrageous “solutions” and other unorthodox marketing strategies. It was, among many other things, a stinging critique of American consumerism cloaked in the format of a prank show. Or was it the other way around?

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It is fitting that Nathan For You found a home on Comedy Central. Staples of that network like South Park and The Daily Show are cultural bastions that began in the ‘90s and are still going strong to this day. Shows like these are successful not simply because they are uproariously funny, but because they have timeless premises injectable with endless numbers of variables. South Park could go in pretty much whatever direction it wanted, and The Daily Show, while having to hew more closely to a format than its cartoonish companion, was an open, unfiltered soapbox for any and every subject in the liberal discourse.

Nathan is the Not-So-Secret Ingredient in Nathan For You

     HBO

Given the Comedy Central track record, Nathan For You could have easily run ten, 12, or 15 seasons without running dry of ideas. The fact that it only lasted four seasons (Fielder himself decided that the show should end, rather than it getting canceled by the network) makes it a more precious commodity, a rich, but all-too-brief window into a virtuosic mind equal to that of Sacha Baron Cohen himself. The talent Fielder brings to projects like Who Is America? and How To… makes that work rise to a different level, but it still doesn’t really compare to his onscreen presence.

The character of Nathan Fielder in Nathan For You is built from the dry awkwardness of Napoleon Dynamite combined with the cold cunning of American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. He is innocent enough in his affect, but his persistence is discomfiting and his ideas are often disturbing. The show is indebted to the outrageous spectacle of something like Borat just as it bears the influence of the intimate, character-driven psychosis of a show like Curb Your Enthusiasm. It is unendingly ingenious and increasingly difficult to watch.

The Uncomfortably Comic Persona of Nathan Fielder

     Viacom Media Networks

Nathan’s persona is always well-intentioned, but that is part of what makes the viewing experience so icky. He comes in under the guise of trying to help a business, but often ends up taking advantage of the people he is trying to help – this is all certainly intentional on the part of Nathan the creator, but it is possible that Nathan the character is unaware of how much he is imposing on the lives of these people, and how he is often complicating their struggles more than simplifying them.

The character’s balance of generous ingenuity and cruel manipulation is part of what gives the program its edge which, along with the wide spectrum of awkward, unpolished, authentic humanity spotlighted in the show, separates Nathan For You from more conventional prank comedy shows.

On the surface, it’s light, non-committal entertainment, but when you dig deeper, it becomes truly uncomfortable. An attempt to help a car wash gain more customers ends with Nathan conning the manager out of $200. Nathan’s solution to help a struggling moving company is to exploit the free labor of innocent, unwitting individuals. On multiple occasions, he creates fake reality shows, usually for self-serving purposes – the most flagrant example being a dating show created to trick a former Best Buy employee into divulging proprietary information. Sometimes, like with his epic ‘Dumb Starbucks’ plan, the people he’s helping get completely pushed out of the way.

When it comes to television (reality, drama, or otherwise), we love to watch characters be good at their jobs. The character of Nathan Fielder has almost universally terrible ideas, but he executes them impeccably. Moreover, his confidence is unwavering, and when something goes wrong or a client expresses disagreement or dissatisfaction, Nathan simply moves on and refuses to acknowledge that his plan could be anything less than perfect. He is by no means a hero, and he certainly does his fair share of damage to people’s lives and livelihoods, but we admire him because he doesn’t give up, even when he probably should.