Thar Be Cringe

Nathan Fielder's love affair with uncomfort viewing

There’s something that happens when you watch television late at night with most of the lights off. You’re sitting on your couch or recliner, totally vegged out and focused on what’s in front of you on the screen. Maybe you have a bowl of junk food. You’re definitely dressed in the comfiest (and probably simultaneously the rattiest) clothes you own. Suddenly - during a dark scene - you catch a reflection of yourself on the television screen and you look like an absolute troll. Your hair’s a mess, your posture is atrocious and the expression on your face is a blank slate of zombie-like passivity.

Nothing ruins watching television like seeing yourself reflected on the screen. Nathan Fielder has built a career out of ruining your television for you. His shows - NATHAN FOR YOU, THE REHEARSAL, and now THE CURSE - are reflective mirrors. They are designed to show audiences the worst parts of themselves.

Fielder’s American television career began with semi-faux reality shows in which Fielder combined a scripted character he played - Nathan Fielder the swarmy, perpetually socially awkward self-help guru - with unscripted reactions from marks who had seemingly signed away their privacy for a chance to be humiliated on television. In each program, Fielder dug deeper into the messy inner demons that plague so many folks. He’s obsessed with loneliness and fear and greediness and that little worm in our head that tells us that our lives will never be good enough.

NATHAN FOR YOU starred Fielder as an exaggerated version of himself - a business school graduate who helped struggling businesses come up with elaborately stupid plans to improve their fortune.

As the series progressed, the show shifted its focus more and more away from the initial hook - eventually culminating with a feature-length episode that saw Fielder embark on a cross-country road trip with a Bill Gates impersonator - the two exploring their own deeply embedded loneliness as they sought out human connections. Where did the fake Fielder start and the real Fielder end? The inability to tell is part of what made NATHAN FOR YOU so entertaining.

With his next show, THE REHEARSAL, Nathan Fielder doubled down on the introspective cringe comedy - introducing a new reality show in which Fielder used a seemingly unlimited budget to help people prep for awkward encounters through highly detailed pre-enactments.

As THE REHEARSAL progressed, though, the show dropped its initial premise to instead focus on Fielder seemingly holding a woman hostage as his fake wife as they raised a fake baby together. Fielder pushed the concept to the extremes, but the result was a highly uncomfortable examination of parenting, relationships, divorce, and - once again - loneliness. To what lengths were people willing to go to improve their life? By combining his uncut cringe on-screen persona with real people - well, as real of people as you’re likely to get when you’re dealing with folks who are cool with being recorded for a reality show - Fielder continued his finger in the wound probing of the human condition.

Fielder’s most recent show is THE CURSE, a season-long program in which Fielder fully embraces the scripted format. Written alongside Benny Safdie and Carrie Kemper, THE CURSE follows Fielder and co-star Emma Stone as two hosts of an HGTV reality show about house flippers trying to gentrify a New Mexican community. Fielder is once again fully embracing cringe as a cuckolded husband obsessed with a wife who hates him. Stone, though, absolutely crushes her role - a self-focused narcissist who is obsessed with the concept of being a good person, even though her soul is a bottomless inky pit of emptiness.

Thanks to the entirely scripted format, Fielder and his co-writers are given much more room to truly explore the ideas that interest them. Teetering back and forth between the ultra-realistic (are the other actors in the show actually actors or just folks recruited off the street?) and the absurd THE CURSE bounces around throughout the season, taking opportunities to explore virtue signaling, cultural appropriation, toxic relationships, reality television, and even the supernatural. The show is at its best when it combines the truth with naked weirdness, such as when it uses a bit of stunt casting to bring in Dean Cain for a cameo as a politically ambitious blowhard.

This newsletter was meant to be a primer and introduction to the work of Nathan Fielder for those unfamiliar, not a spoiler-filled recap. I want to leave some of the surprises intact for those who have not yet gone down the Fielder cannon rabbit hole. That said, there are moments inside THE CURSE that stung with how close they came to unfettered truth. I have been fascinated for a while by the idea of self-improvement - the chasing of the dragon that is being a Good Person™. THE CURSE - specifically Emma Stone’s role in the program - makes a meal out of this idea. Stone’s Whitney is so obsessed with the way others perceive her that she abandons her own self-perception. As Stone becomes trapped by her pursuit of public persona, the show becomes some of the most uncomfortable television I have ever watched - just pure, untethered narcissistic weirdness.

Throughout all three of his television shows, Fielder has never left the initial theme he explored in NATHAN FOR YOU - loneliness. There’s a reason why one of Fielder’s most viral online contributions was this Tweet.

Watching television is often a lonely experience. Even if you’re watching it with somebody in the same room (as I did with THE CURSE and my fiancé) or you’re watching the show with the general online public - posting live reactions to the social media platform of your choice - you’re still engaging with a piece of art on a one-to-one basis. You’re perceiving individual feelings and emotions from that show, totally separate and distinct from anybody else who watches it. You’re looking in a mirror that is also a window - occasionally catching your reflection. Sometimes the experience is painful but - like cringe - pain can also be entertaining as hell.