Reviews

The male lead strugglingly juggles humanitarianism and utilitarianism just like Nathan Fielder walks the thin tightwire of integrity. Beyond the scope of addressing racism, depiction of modern anxiety and existential discomfort is reminiscent of A24's Beef, and the portrayal of narrative manipulation behind the camera of reality TV recalls Unreal. Apparently, Nathan Fielder graduated from the Fielder Method workshop with really good grades. The fictional burned-victim version of The Bachelor was definitely Fielder's odd brainchild, and I died laughing.

The guy's wife represents morality, and his businesss partner symbolizes pragmatism. He attempts to appease both.

Emotionally taxing and intellectually compelling, the season finale broke me. The anthropological observation under the name of helping people rehearse life, though seemingly rational and objective, has layers of delicate and messy emotions running in its underbelly: the guilt of leaving someone, the grief of having someone leave you, the remorse of making someone leave you, and people's faith, hope, love and forgiveness. This meta theatrical lab of Nathan's seems to be motivated by his not letting go of things in the past. The cocktail of joy and pain that is this series shows the depths that he feels and thinks as a human, through all those social/interactional accidents in life. This social experiment reached the conclusion that one should be more tolerant to their own feelings and mistakes as Nathan told his fake son (and himself) that Nathan and the single mom make mistakes, that it's okay to feel sad and confused.

It broke my soul to see the child actor cry. Thus Nathan has now caused emotional trauma to a fatherless boy and a grown man in inheritance dispute. It killed me when the single mom said she saw herself in her son so that she knew her son would be okay. With loneliness and sense of meaninglessness intensified by modern rationalism and scientism, perhaps family or something to believe provide the greatest comfort.

Just when you barely recovered from the stirringly funny-sad episode 3, this week hit even harder. What began as a workshop for training actors turned into something reminiscent of the movie Synecdoche New York, where Nathan played one of the trainees who felt ambivalent about the stalkerish nature of the Nathan's method, and Nathan virtually stalked him to his bedroom with pokemon and rilakkuma stuff animals. This meta, acting-within-acting approach is social anxiety and regurgitated thoughts at play: Did they like me? If not, why? Unbearable social rejection prompts Nathan to reenact and thereby reexamine life events for himself and for others, but such a crazy replay of life, backed by major network budget, is not something everyone is able, or willing, to do.

This show leaves me feeling everything at all once. It's a social experiment, performance art (pun unintended), a tragicomedy that makes you laugh, cry, think and want more.