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ABSTRACT
This article argues that Comedy Central’s Nathan For You enacts a sophisticated critique of reality television and offers a different way of capturing ‘reality’ on the small screen. By exaggerating the format’s countless constraints, Nathan for You discovers a way to create real and moving drama from reality television conventions. Using examples taken from across the series, the article argues that the show exemplifies the New Sincerity aesthetic that scholars in numerous other fields have found across contemporary US culture. What Fielder’s project ultimately reveals is that the most exaggerated and grotesque forms of reality-television manipulation can paradoxically open up spaces of sincere communication and feeling. The article also explores many of the formal and stylistic devices that Fielder uses across the series, building a case for a reevaluation of the series.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1. For a useful overview of such scholarship, see Collins (Citation2009, 2–12).
2. See also: J. Fitzgerald (Citation2013); Shaviro’s (Citation2010); Sconce (Citation2002); and Timmer (Citation2010).
3. A 2018 call-for-papers from the European Association of American Studies provides a useful shorthand definition for the New Sincerity. The conference organisers point out that it ‘is characterized by a yearning for interpersonal connection, affect, trust, and belief. Despite poststructural proclamations of the “Death of the Author,” the New Sincerity reframes the artwork as a medium of communication between artists and their audiences.’
4. I also have in mind what Stanley Cavell (2002, 229) describes, in ‘A Matter of Meaning It,’ as ‘intention and seriousness and sincerity’ in art. It is also worth recalling Robert Chodat’s helpful reminder, that ‘“Sincerity” and “conviction” pertain chiefly to the mood of an utterance, not to its content: one can be sincere or convinced about anything.’ Chodat (Citation2017), 275.
5. Of course, this format has been relentlessly, mercilessly parodied in a range of comedy television programs, particularly during the 2000s boom in satirical television. For a thorough analysis of this boom, see Satire TV (Citation2009).
6. Some gestures toward this kind of analysis have been made by Marx (Citation2016, 272–287).
7. I am thinking particularly of key moments in Grizzly Man (2005) and Into the Abyss (2011).
8. For more on the notion of post-irony, see Konstantinou’s Cool Characters (Citation2016).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Lucas Thompson
Lucas Thompson is a Lecturer in English at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Global Wallace: David Foster Wallace and World Literature (Bloomsbury, 2017) and has published extensively on contemporary US fiction. His next book project, tentatively titled Metaphors We Read By, offers a postcritical account of literary interpretation and reception.