It’s Q4 already?! What happened to the year? It seems like just yesterday I was on the set of Yaga, sitting down with showrunner Kat Sandler and stars Carrie-Anne Moss, Noah Reid, and Clark Backo, to talk all things witchy sexy and Canadian. That set visit, which I conducted in mid-March, is finally published for Harper’s Bazaar ahead of Friday’s premiere. It’s a fun read I think, I got to thread a lot more of myself in the piece than usual. And I got to print “horny” twice in the same paragraph! I’ve spent a lot of time in Victoria over the years (end of high school, undergrad, and a year and a half of the pandemic), it’s very rewarding to have been invited on the set of somewhere I consider a hometown. Also quite surreal to be sitting face to face with Moss in particular as someone obsessed with The Matrix growing up. Yaga is a worthwhile watch! I think it’s emerging as one of the stronger spooky shows of this month.
The talk of the town this week is Nathan Fielder’s new documentary, You Can See Everything, which went from a surprise screening at the Telluride Film Festival to theatres in a matter of weeks. The documentary is Fielder’s feature-length debut, he has previously only worked in television, and he is one of those auteurs whose work carries a through-line between everything he’s made. I’m of course contractually obligated to say Fielder and I both attended the same university (the University of Victoria) (“with really good grades”). The documentary sees Fielder invited into the home of Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks before she begins her federal prison sentence. She was convicted of fraud for claiming her company had invented a machine that could conduct a blood test using a single drop of blood. The company was once valued at $9 billion, even though the machine never really worked.
The documentary, which I saw over the weekend, is extremely intimate. The goal of Holmes and her partner Billy Evans was to let audiences into their lives and shift the narrative around Holmes as a devious scammer in the hopes of getting Theranos 2.0 up and running. I left the documentary absolutely in awe—it’s brilliantly put together, but I also immediately wondered if anyone would understand the layers here without having seen any of Fielder’s previous work. I’d argue that checking out some of the shows below will significantly improve and inform your journey into this magnificent, 3-hour documentary that is destined for the Oscars. Here’s what I recommend, from least important to must-watch.
4. The Curse (10 episodes for Showtime, 2023)
This comedy series from the minds of Fielder and Benny Safdie ranks at the bottom of the list of relevant shows to watch before You Can See Everything, and I don’t remember loving it while I was watching. That said, if you haven’t been spoiled to what happens at the end of this series, it’s totally worth watching for one of the wackiest finales I’ve ever seen in my 32 years on this planet.
Emma Stone and Fielder star as Whitney and Asher, a married couple who are making an HGTV show about “passive homes” (efficient houses that are constructed to have a very low carbon footprint). Safdie plays their producer Dougie, and the show is written to have a cringe-inducing, awkward, stilted sensibility to it that feels at home in Fielder’s extended TV universe—with the addition of some thought-provoking explorations of gentrification (Nizhonniya Luxi Austin gives an underrated but TV Scholar Award-nominated performance as an Indigenous artist who Whitney gets obsessed with).
Bottom line, should I watch it before YCSE? For this purpose alone, you can skip it.
3. Nathan For You (32 episodes for Comedy Central, 2013–2017)
Nathan For You is really Fielder’s television break-out. The premise is that Fielder, who graduated from “one of Canada’s top business schools,” offers advice to struggling businesses on how they can bring in more cashflow. The ideas are wacky right from the jump: Introducing a poo flavour to a frozen yogurt shop to draw in curious clientele, or advertising a low gas price at a gas station that is actually only that cheap from an optional rebate, of which you need to climb a mountain to claim—you get the idea.
I’m only through the first season of the show so far and it’s very entertaining as long as you’re okay with people basically getting ridiculed. There’s a bullyish/trolling vibe to NFY which feels very early 2010s Comedy Central. Nothing overtly problematic so far in my watching although it plays with that line for sure. I’m having fun watching it, but you can tell this is just the beginning stages of Fielder finding his voice. From what I’m hearing, the later episodes really start to highlight his genius for meta narratives and the kind of exhaustive approach he takes to unpacking the natural oddity of the human experience (I can’t think of a better way to put that).
Bottom line, should I watch it before YCSE? If you’ve watched the two shows below and you want to enhance your experience and knowledge of Fielder, I say go for it. As someone who hadn’t seen it before the movie, I didn’t think it was required viewing for that purpose alone.
2. The Rehearsal (12 episodes for HBO, 2022–)
Independently from the documentary, The Rehearsal is incredible television. Like mind-blowingly good, fascinating, smart—I have no shortage of good things to say here. The basic idea behind this docu-comedy series is that anything can be “rehearsed” with enough resources. On an HBO budget, Fielder really lets it rip. He begins small in the first episode: A real-life man wants to come clean about something he’s been lying about with his trivia friend. To prepare him for the confession, Fielder and his team re-create the entire trivia bar down to the smallest detail, and he hires actors who he trains in the “Fielder Method”—these extras are tasked with studying their real-life counterparts and really immersing themselves in that “character.” That allows this man to be in the closest version of the real scenario as possible and play out all of its different possible iterations.
That alone was enough to sell me, but the show continues to build on itself as Fielder devises grander, more complex, and more significant rehearsals—until he’s trying to solve why plane crashes happen in the second season. We also frequently see Fielder himself rehearsing things of his own to get to some kind of further understanding of himself or the scenario. That detail is super important to You Can See Everything. The first half of the documentary is very different from NFY and TR in the sense that there is no voiceover and Fielder has no one to bounce ideas off of, we are really just left with our own interpretation of what we’re watching. The second half blows that out of the water and becomes very Rehearsalian (?). I think to understand the full scale of what goes into one such rehearsal would really impact your experience of that portion of the documentary.
Bottom line, should I watch it before YCSE? In my view, yes, 100%, absolutely, will make the documentary make SO much more sense.
1. The Dropout (8 episodes for Hulu, 2022)
Okay so this is the only show on this list that is not related to Fielder at all. Rather, this is the Amanda Seyfried-starring biopic that fictionalizes Holmes’s life, from dropping out of college to meeting Sunny Balwani (Naveen Andrews) and the inevitable implosion of Theranos. If you were a fan of Furious, this is created by that same showrunner, Liz Meriwether, who is also working on the Britney Spears biopic.
There is a primary reason this is relevant: It helps fill in the gaps that You Can See Everything doesn’t cover. The documentary actually more or less assumes you have some baseline knowledge here—Sunny is only mentioned once or twice, but it’s helpful to understand the nature of her relationship with him to understand the new dynamic with Evans (who is played briefly by Garrett Coffey). In the documentary, you also get to watch Holmes watch The Dropout for the first time. It’s brought up numerous times, actually, in terms of how she feels about how Seyfried represented her and the ways in which she believes it to have negatively damaged her reputation.
Then there is the second, arguably more important reason you need to watch The Dropout. To say what that is would be to spoil a major twist in You Can See Everything, which I have to say, between the internet and press, for whatever reason, I went into the movie unspoiled on this (and I’m fairly chronically online). You’ll just have to trust me on this one, and know that your completion of this show will dramatically shift your understanding of what is going to occur in that documentary. I’ll leave it at that!
Re: NFY: hang in there, the show evolves quite a bit in four seasons, and that in itself makes for unusual television, given the genre and the time period.
Honestly, in the theatre, you could hear and feel the reactions of those of use who knew his work, and in particular, The Rehearsal. And I'd argue that even with the differences you pointed out in the first half of the movie, it still adds a layer of understanding about what's going on and how Fielder approaches the whole situation.
As a former Comedy Central employee, this list is so important to me!!! Can’t wait to hear what you think of the rest of NFY!