Nathan Fielder’s success with You Can See Everything feels like a personal win for every comedy lover. For more than a decade he has made some of the strangest, most uncomfortable and most original comedy on television. Now a documentary he co-directed is being called one of the best films of the year.
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Nathan for You: deadpan taken as far as it can go
Fielder made his name with Nathan for You on Comedy Central, which ran from 2013 to 2017. The premise sounded simple. A business graduate with, as he put it, really good grades would help struggling small businesses with ideas that were clearly terrible. He delivered every one with a completely straight face.
Some of those ideas escaped the show and became real-world events. Dumb Starbucks opened in Los Angeles in 2014, a coffee shop that copied the Starbucks branding and argued it was legal as parody art. It drew long queues before it was revealed as a Nathan for You stunt. Summit Ice was a winter clothing brand built to promote Holocaust awareness, a deliberately absurd pairing that turned into a real company and raised money for a Holocaust education centre.
The joke was never only the idea. It was watching real people decide, in real time, whether to go along with it. Fielder never winked at the camera. That refusal is what made the show feel unlike anything else, and it is why people still compare him with Andy Kaufman.
The Rehearsal: blurring reality and scripted television
The Rehearsal on HBO took the idea further. Fielder built detailed replicas of real places and hired actors so that ordinary people could rehearse difficult moments of their lives before living them. The rehearsals kept growing, and the line between what was real and what was staged became harder and harder to find.
In the second season he turned the method on aviation safety and how pilots talk to each other in the cockpit, and even dressed up as Captain Sully himself. It was funny, unsettling and oddly moving, often in the same scene. Few comedians have made something that people argue about this much, and fewer have done it twice.
You Can See Everything
You Can See Everything is a documentary directed by Fielder and Lance Oppenheim about Elizabeth Holmes, the founder of Theranos, and her partner Billy Evans. It was filmed over about three years, around the time Holmes began her prison sentence for fraud. It runs close to three hours, Fielder appears on screen as himself, and it was released by A24 after a surprise screening at the Telluride Film Festival in September.
Critics have been close to unanimous. The film holds 99% on Rotten Tomatoes from more than a hundred reviews and a 99 on Metacritic. The Globe and Mail called it the best and most essential movie of the year, and some critics are already arguing it deserves an Oscar, including a case for it to become the first documentary nominated for Best Picture. Nothing has been announced yet, so treat that as hope rather than fact.
It is not his first feature-length documentary. The final episode of Nathan for You, Finding Frances, was a feature in its own right. But this is the first time the wider film world has treated him as a serious filmmaker rather than a comedian with an unusual TV show.
Why it feels like a personal win
Fielder has always taken on challenges that most comedians would avoid. He built a fake coffee chain, a clothing company and full-size replicas of people’s lives, all in service of jokes that only worked if he never broke character. Every one of those projects could have failed in public.
You Can See Everything is his biggest risk yet. A three-hour documentary about one of the most talked-about frauds in recent memory, made by someone best known for deadpan comedy, could easily have been dismissed. Instead it has paid off.
For anyone who has followed him since the days of Dumb Starbucks, that is the satisfying part. The thing that made him funny, his patience, his refusal to look away from an awkward moment, his interest in what people do when they think the camera is not the point, turns out to be exactly what makes a great documentary.
For more on comedians who changed the form, read our review of Norm: The Tale of Norm Macdonald and why George Carlin’s comedy survived the test of time, or browse all our comedian interviews.