Nathan for You’s season-four finale is the most remarkable TV episode of the year
Midway through through “Finding Frances,” the 90-minute fourth-season finale of Nathan for You, creator/host Nathan Fielder is sitting in a hotel room with maybe-sorta-professional Bill Gates impersonator William Heath watching one of the 2016 Trump/Clinton presidential debates.
“Trump’s the man for the presidency,” Heath says to Fielder. It’s stated without aggression, the way you might throw out any inane comment to a friend after you’ve stayed up too late watching something neither of you is particularly interested in. He adds, “I’m trying to convince you Trump is the man. You seem to think he’s not going to win”
“Well he’s losing in the polls,” Fielder responds, with the same kind of unfocused boredom.
The moment feels like a throwaway, aside from the painful twinge of historical irony. It’s a necessary downbeat in the midst of a story of lost love and regret curdled into obsession that’s equal parts compelling and cringe-worthy, a brief drum fill bridging the verse and chorus in an extended ballad. It’s hardly shocking that Heath, an elderly white man who earlier in the episode requests a restaurant TV be tuned to Fox News, voted for Trump, so it’s easy to read the moment as, at best, a small and expected joke at his expense, if not mere time-filler in the extended episode.
But it’s so much more than that. It’s indicative of what makes both the show and the episode so compulsively watchable, even when it’s at its most uncomfortable. It’s a character study of a character who may be undeserving of sympathy but remains compelling nonetheless, a man whose behavior towards women renders him particularly odious — which makes the Trump connection feel inevitable rather than invasive. And it’s a story in which both major players, Fielder and Heath, err and obfuscate, keeping essential details from each other and from the audience. They consistently get things wrong just because they don’t fit the story that makes the most sense. Clinton is supposed to win, Heath is supposed to be a sweet if awkward old man, because that’s how these stories are supposed to go, until they don’t.
Nathan for You in general, and “Finding Frances” in particular, thrives on the tension between image and reality. Fielder’s name may be in the title, but the real stars are the quote-unquote “ordinary” people he highlights in each episode, often people who crave the attention of the camera but clearly do not belong in front of it. Much of Nathan for You’s comedy comes from Fielder interacting with people who have clearly ingested enough reality TV to know in broad contours how to behave in front of a camera but lack the personality or talent to thrive once the lights are on them, like an off-key karaoke cover of a pop hit.
A strange feature of Nathan for You is that the presence of cameras seems to make people more honest rather than less. There’s an earnestness to many of Fielder’s “co-stars,” who are often more than willing to reveal embarrassingly personal details with (apparently) minimal prompting from Fielder. Midway through “Finding Frances,” an “age progression specialist” manages to insert his opinion that within the next few decades, most humans will be living in space and surviving to age six hundred. It’s the perfect mix of scam and honesty — the man’s profession is junk science, producing a laughably poor attempt to “age” a photo from the 1960s to show what the subject might look like now, but his futurist convictions seem entirely honest, and free of shame.
That’s part of why Nathan for You’s comedy so rarely seems mean-spirited. Fielder is giving his subjects exactly what they want: the spotlight. It doesn’t hurt that, like the age-progression specialist, Fielder’s subjects are exploiting him as much as he is them. At least three former Nathan for You guests have attempted to launch reality series of their own, to mixed success. Everyone wants to be a star, even — or maybe especially — those too awkward and downright odd to master basic social interaction.
Celebrity impersonators seem to be a favorite subject of Fielder’s. It’s a profession that necessarily attracts those so desperate for a taste of fame — and so unable to attain it on their own — they have to attach themselves, remora-like, to the underbelly of a larger and more successful creature. This season already featured several impersonators in its premiere, “The Richards Tip,” including a Jim Carrey/Ace Ventura impersonator and a Michael Richards/Kramer impersonator who both seemed unclear on whether they had made a career aping the actor or the role.
In the previous season’s finale, Fielder flipped this dynamic by impersonating a stranger in order to allow that ordinary man to take credit for a heroic stunt Fielder had actually performed, injecting the exceptional into the mundane instead of vice versa. The show is premised on seeing how much leeway people will allow Fielder, with his byzantine business improvement ideas and ludicrous reality-TV-twisted-inside-out setups, simply because he has a camera crew and a distribution deal, but as often as not it’s the subjects who outdo Fielder’s strangeness, not vice-versa.
Even within the off-kilter cosmos of Nathan for You bit players, William Heath stands out. He first appeared in a second-season episode as an ostensibly-professional Bill Gates impersonator who seemed to know nothing about Microsoft, Bill Gates, or the basic functionality and purpose of computers. He was a sick kind of platonic ideal for a Nathan for You character, someone so desperately out of place they attempt to become another, more famous, person, regardless of likeness or even knowledge of that person’s body of work.
In the opening minutes of “Finding Frances,” we see the depths of that desperation — the small taste of fame an embarrassing cameo on a little-watched Comedy Central program brought him was so intoxicating he has kept appearing at the Nathan for You offices for years after his brief moment on the show, often bearing gifts and sad stories about a lost love from years ago. The details of his life are unbearably sad: never married, no children, seemingly no friends, nothing but a love of Arkansas Razorbacks college football and regret to keep him going. He keeps all his junk mail neatly organized and displays it with satisfaction for the cameras, as if he’s proud simply to have proof somewhere someone knows he’s alive, even if it’s just pre-approved loan scammers.
If there’s one thing giving his life purpose, it’s his memories of an old flame from the 60s, Frances Gaddy. As he tells it, he loved her dearly, and would’ve married her if not for the interference of his mother. Out of either sympathy or an instinct that there has to be a good episode of television in Heath’s story, Fielder decides to use the resources of his show to track down Gaddy. Nathan for You toes the line between irony and sincerity, with many episodes ending with an almost-earnest mimicry of the kind of hollow uplift endemic to the kind of aspirational reality storytelling and motivational self-improvement narratives Fielder cribs heavily from. Heath seems like an ideal centerpiece for an extended examination: undeniably comic and ripe for subtle mockery, but also with the potential for real pathos. He’s someone the audience can both laugh at and root for.
That’s at least what the episode sets up. But as the investigation into Gaddy’s whereabouts continue, Heath’s story begins to unravel, and he’s cast in an ever-dimmer light. It wasn’t simply his mother’s disapproval that ended the relationship. He abandoned her to pursue an acting career in Hollywood, one that evidently and unsurprisingly never materialized, and he cheated on her somewhere along the line. They weren’t ill-fated lovers destined for a reunion in the final act of their lives; he was an ass, and she moved on.
Fielder has a need to complicate his own plots, his business-improvement schemes reliably sprawling out into labyrinthine machinations born of his desire to exploit every loophole and logical leap to absurd extremes. But in “Finding Frances,” there’s no need for Fielder to invent complications. The shifting sympathies necessitated by the ultimate ambiguity of Heath’s motivations are enough to keep the audience on their toes without Fielder building his usual comic Rube Goldberg machines, although that doesn’t stop him from forcing one or two in.
Things turn even darker when Fielder finally locates Gaddy and discovers she has been married for nearly fifty years. This is simply unacceptable to Heath. He rants about the inadequacy of her husband (his judgment coming entirely from a Facebook photo) and seems intent on attempting to disrupt the marriage, apparently incapable of conceiving that she might have an opinion on the matter. He has a generally dismissive attitude towards women — role-playing his reunion with Gaddy with a lookalike, he comes onto her and starts feeling her up the moment he gets in the door, and earlier waves off the possibility of even speaking with a sex worker (more on that later) by saying, “You’ve got to know where you’re sticking it.” If Heath ever loved Gaddy in a truly healthy way, and it’s doubtful based on what we know of their relationship, she’s long since become an object to be possessed, a deus ex machina to rescue Heath from his loneliness.
It’s atypical for Fielder to push his subjects hard, but he does so with Heath on these points. Fielder’s modus operandi is to simply let the camera roll long enough for his subjects to stumble. He — or the character he’s playing, it’s never quite clear — is himself an often painfully awkward and soft-spoken host, and his primary feint is to simply let his subjects feel the need to fill the space left by his uncomfortable timidity, perhaps giving them the slightest of pushes in the direction of their own embarrassment as they try to overcompensate for his awkward restraint. The show functions on unexpected revelation, not forced confrontation, as so many reality programs do; in a season-one episode, a gas station attendant volunteers the information that he has drank his grandson’s urine virtually without prompting.
But in “Finding Frances,” Fielder throws out the playbook and confronts Heath directly. The moments when Fielder calls out Heath’s lies don’t have the comic payoff of the typical Nathan for You interaction, but there’s something compellingly human about watching him sweat and mumble as he tries to come up with an adequate explanation for his own untruths and misdeeds. You can see the gears turn as he searches for a way out of the trap he’s thrown himself into.
All the while, Fielder is playing his own narrative games. There’s a b-plot in the middle section of the episode about his budding relationship with an escort named Maci. Originally, he hires her so Heath can practice interacting with the opposite sex before his reunion with Gaddy, but Heath shoots that plan down so Fielder, having already paid, takes her out on a date and ends up hitting it off with her.
Like so many interactions on Nathan for You, the relationship between Fielder and Maci is transactional, although the typical tradeoff made by Fielder’s guest stars is embarrassment for exposure. But Maci and Fielder’s first dates are chaste and sweet in an awkward kind of way, and at the end of one Maci proposes they meet for something more private and intimate, and Fielder agrees.
This leads to one of the more remarkable sequences in the episode, in which Fielder and Maci meet in his hotel bedroom. Fielder has played around with transactional intimacy before, in one episode creating a fake dating show with himself at the center so that aspiring actresses would swoon shamelessly over his stiff romantic overtures. But there’s still something bold about seeing a real sex worker kiss a client on basic-cable television. The scene ends with a quick cut from a kiss to Maci leaving the room, and although it’s certainly implied nothing more went on in the hotel room, the abruptness of the cut leaves open the possibility that Fielder is choosing to elide over something more intimate. Unlike his subjects, Fielder can decide when the cameras stop rolling.
However, as far as the audience knows, at no point does Heath ask for the cameras to be turned off, despite his obvious discomfort when confronted by Fielder. To turn them off would be to admit that the image has crumbled, that the Hollywood redemption tale this failed actor has constructed for himself was all an illusion and needs to be scrapped. As long as the cameras roll, hope lives.
Heath even requests the cameras come with him when he goes to finally meet Gaddy. This could be read as Heath ultimately being too nervous to go alone and wanting the backup of Fielder, who might be the closest thing he has to a friend in the world. But it’s also clear that Heath has placed himself at the center of a love story and wants his Hollywood ending.
Heath isn’t the only one willing to sacrifice for the camera. Early in the episode, Fielder attempts to get information about Gaddy from her alma mater. When he approaches the administration with the real story, he’s rebuffed — only parents are allowed to visit high school grounds. But when he and Heath pose as crew for a made-up sequel to a Matthew McConaughey movie, they’re invited in during school hours and allowed to leave with a yearbook.
Perhaps fittingly, perhaps not, Heath’s reunion with Gaddy does play out like a movie — only a much more melancholy, more complex film than Heath hoped for. Fielder convinces Heath that if he’s going to show up at her door with a camera crew, he should at least call her and give her a fair warning. They pull just out of sight and make the call, which proceeds awkwardly at first — Heath seems constitutionally incapable of just telling any woman who’s calling, instead making them guess his name in a kind of neurotic power play.
But eventually Heath (re)introduces himself to Gaddy. It becomes clear, over the course of the call, that she has fond memories of him — but that’s all she has, nothing more, and that she’s very happy with the way her life turned out. And, amazingly, Heath seems to accept that. He doesn’t try to force his way on her. They chat for a minute before hanging up. They drive away without Gaddy ever being aware Heath was just around the corner. Heath, clearly emotional, leaves his Hollywood storyline behind, his most humane moment also his most bittersweet.
Heath is not a particularly nice man, nor is he a particularly likable subject, but watching him reconcile himself to the fact that he will never realize the dream that has kept him going through long lonely decades is heartbreaking, remarkable television. There’s something undeniably human, even noble about it; Heath is the rare Nathan for You guest to rise to the occasion when the cameras are on him. It’s not much — his moment of moral triumph is simply to not try and break up a marriage that has lasted for nearly half a century, as he so badly wants to do. But after four seasons of watching Fielder’s subjects debase themselves for the camera, it’s refreshing — inspiring, almost — to see someone choose dignity over their dreams.
“Finding Frances” is a jagged ninety minutes of television, the more traditional Nathan for You bits sitting somewhat dissonantly next to moments that play like something out of a Sundance doc. But it does what the show does at its very best, which is to deliver completely unexpected moments of hilarious and heartbreaking honesty that are unlike anything else on television. Fielder tacks on a pair of happy endings, both for himself and for Heath, that feel at once sincere and false, but it’s hard to fault him for it — he wants a clean ending that looks good for television, just like Bill Heath, just like all of us.
