The 10 Best Nathan For You Episodes, Ranked — From Dumb Starbucks to Finding Frances

When Best Buy’s price-match guarantee nearly drives a struggling television store out of business, Fielder proposes a promotion in which they sell flat-screen televisions for one dollar. The only catch is that customers hoping to cash in on the deal need to dress in tuxedos or ball gowns, walk through a tiny door, and get past an actual live alligator. (Yes, they brought an alligator into the store.) Meanwhile, Fielder and the store owner must approach Best Buy and ask them to match the $1 price so they can stock up on televisions to sell at market rate. We’ll avoid spoiling it from here, but the scheme eventually involves Nathan dressing up like a teenage goth, complete with a lip ring, and taking a salsa lesson in a park with a former Best Buy worker, creating a meme that’ll live forever.

To help a Los Angeles souvenir shop experiencing a sales lull, Fielder sets up a fake movie shoot inside the store, complete with two Johnny Depp impersonators and a ridiculous storyline about hacking into an asteroid headed for Earth, and invites people in to serve as extras — only if they buy something. But after realizing he could be sued for fraud, Fielder has to actually make the movie and enter it into a film festival. This is a hilarious episode on its own, but it also introduced a Bill Gates impersonator (William Heath) who knows almost nothing about the Microsoft founder besides the fact that computers used to be much bigger. He plays a much bigger role in the Nathan for You saga down the line.

Some of the best Nathan for You moments involve fooling local television stations into believing that Fielder’s wild ploys are actually legit. In “The Movement,” he hires a professional bodybuilder, Jack Garbarino, and has him claim that he lost hundreds of pounds simply by moving boxes. He even has a ghostwriter write a fake memoir about the journey. This lands Garbarino on numerous morning shows, where he encourages people to perform unpaid labor for a moving company. When Fielder suspects Garbarino has been going to a gym and blowing their cover story, he trails him with a professional detective, Brian Wolfe, who is a key character in the extended Fielder-verse. In this episode, we learn about Wolfe’s background as a model in 1980s adult magazines. Their prolonged debate about what exactly constitutes “pornography” is Nathan for You at its absolute best.

It’s been illegal to smoke in bars and restaurants in California for well over 30 years. But when Fielder learns that it is permissible to smoke onstage during live performances, he brings theater chairs into a dingy bar in an effort to drum up business, tells the regulars they can light up, charges admission, and calls the whole thing a play. This leads to a wild situation in which he hires actors to recreate the evening, note for note. The entire episode feels like a dry run for The Rehearsal.

There are certain Nathan for You quotes (“I could go for a mother effin’ beer”; “He died when baboons kidnapped and ate him”; “A ghost choked you in Switzerland?”) that fans speak to each other almost like a hidden language. One of the first was “Goat in the water!” from a Season One episode in which Fielder promotes a petting zoo by creating a fake viral video featuring a hero pig that rescues a goat from drowning. The clip ricochets all across the internet and winds up on Morning Joe and other cable channels. It was the first time Fielder would pull off this sort of stunt, and most definitely not the last.

Breaking a bit from the series formula, in this episode Fielder starts his own company, Summit Ice Apparel, after learning that a ski jacket manufacturer honored a prominent Holocaust denier in its newsletter. The Summit Ice soft-shell jacket becomes a real-life success story after Fielder promotes it with a pop-up shop in Vancouver, and he donates all the proceeds to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. All was well for several years until Paramount+ removed the episode because it deemed it antisemitic. Fielder responded with a scathing segment in the second season of The Rehearsal, only driving up Summit Ice sales even further. (They have a great line of clothing on their website. Check it out.)

Back in 2013, gas prices were nowhere near as high as they are now, but Fielder still caused massive lines at a Los Angeles service station when he convinced the owner to offer massively discounted fuel. The only catch was that the low price came after a rebate that could only be filed at a hidden box on a mountaintop, which could only be found after answering a series of riddles. A small group of intrepid Los Angelenos with a lot of time on their hands accompanied Fielder to the mountain and even agreed to spend the night there in tents. This became one of Fielder’s most famous stunts and was even discussed briefly in You Can See Everything. The best part may come at the very end, when the gas station owner reveals that he drinks his grandson’s urine and Fielder can’t mask his genuine shock.

As Nathan for You stretched on over the years, Fielder began breaking free of the tight premise and experimenting with grandiose ideas that had no connection to actual businesses. He took things to a new level of craziness and dedication in the Season Three finale, “The Hero,” in which he takes a down-on-his-luck everyman named Corey Calderwood and transforms him into a hero capable of walking a tightrope between two tall buildings and winning the love of a young woman. To do this, Fielder stashes the real Calderwood in a remote trailer and literally becomes him via a bodysuit and latex mask. He even learned how to tightrope-walk. It was the most ambitious Nathan for You concept up to that point, and another preview of what The Rehearsal would eventually become.

After the “goat in the water!” video from Season One’s “The Petting Zoo” spread across the internet, Fielder had no plan to repeat the bit in Season Two by creating another viral sensation. But his scheme to save a struggling coffee shop by rechristening it “Dumb Starbucks,” resting the legal justification on parody law, was so successful that giant lines formed within days and people started to speculate that it might be an art installation by Banksy. This created a media firestorm that landed Fielder on Jimmy Kimmel’s couch and helped Nathan for You find a following after flying largely under the radar in Season One.

The Nathan for You universe of characters gradually grew over the course of four seasons to include not just private detective Brian Wolfe but also retired judge Anthony Filosa, television host Anthony Napoli, and shopping mall Santa Claus James Bailey. None of them were quite as riveting as Bill Gates impersonator William Heath, whom we first met in Season Two’s “Souvenir Shop.” The curiosity he provoked wasn’t just because he didn’t look much like Bill Gates, nor did he really know anything about computers. Heath brought a bizarre, borderline-creepy energy to his brief scenes that made you want to know more about him. We finally got the chance in the epic Nathan for You series finale, in which Fielder accompanies Heath on a cross-country quest to track down his first love, Frances. It’s an 84-minute episode that allows plenty of time for meditations on love, loss, regret, and the passage of time. It also had nothing to do with helping a struggling business. But Fielder had outgrown the show’s original concept by this point, in addition to the limited budgets and other constraints of basic cable. It was time to start thinking much bigger — and just a few years later, The Rehearsal was born.