Nathan for You: Finding Frances (2017)

Dir. Nathan Fielder

I’m genuinely blown away by this. How do you end a show like Nathan For You? You’d expect it to just be another episode, probably of a bigger scale, but nothing that actually feels like it wraps up a 4-season-long narrative. Now, not that the show has character arcs and big storylines, but this episode was more about the theme of loneliness that’s always been present in Nathan For You, of which was always played as a joke. However, Nathan mostly drops his NFY persona in Finding Frances, and goes on a journey with the “professional” Bill Gates impersonator, who was seen in a few previous episodes, in a long-shot attempt to reconnect Bill with a woman from his younger years. 

Seeing, like I said, Nathan act a little more genuine in this episode (more or less), was honestly surreal. But, as the story progresses, you really feel like you’re in Nathan’s situation, rarely knowing anything about Bill, and not knowing what direction the episode would go in. I was worried that the wall they hit after the fake reunion would make for a remainder of the runtime that would feel aimless and filler-y. Fortunately, Nathan and crew actually played into that aspect of the documentary (is this technically a documentary?), making that theme the center-point of the story. When I say that I legitimately did not know what I would be expecting from scene to scene, I’m not joking. Finding Frances had me glued to the screen for the entire hour and a half runtime, and it makes you look back on NFY—and life as a whole—with a different perspective.

7/18/22