Nathan For You [tv show]

A huge favorite of mine. Nathan Fielder is a “business expert” who comes up with hilarious, incredibly ludicrous, far-fetched ideas to save struggling businesses in this unscripted, quasi-“reality” show.

Just one example off the top of my head: a struggling appliance store is being run out of business by a nearby major chain store. When the chain store advertises that they’ll match any advertised price, Fielder advises the appliance store owner to start advertising a certain TV for $1. Then, he’ll send people over to buy out that TV from the chain store for $1, and when they’re out of stock, his client can raise the price again and resell them in his own store for full price, a 100% profit.

In the kind of complication the show specialized in, somebody noticed that if he advertised the TV for $1, someone might come in and try to buy it for $1. But Fielder has a plan. When people show up looking for the advertised special, he throws numerous obstacles in their way, including pointing to a sign that the store put up that they now have a dress code, and formalwear is required to enter.

Then when one person comes back later dressed in a tuxedo and demands to buy the TV, Fielder tells him, sure, it’s right in our special room in the back, and leads him to a back wall… with a tiny, one-foot door in it. He tells the man, “that’s the premium TV section, they’re expensive so we keep them in a special room.”

The man gets down and squeezes through the door…

…and then we see inside, as the man stands up: he’s in one room, and then there’s some kind of glassed-in middle room he has to walk through, and then, on the other side of the middle room, there’s the room with the $1 TV.

And, in the middle room, is a live alligator.

So the man gives up and leaves. And as he sees him out of the store, Nathan innocently asks him, “So… you don’t want to buy the TV?” And says to him, “I feel bad, too, you know. That’s $1 of profit we’re not getting.”

Meanwhile, as this is all going on, there’s a second ridiculous subplot of Fielder trying to hire people to go buy TVs for $1 from the chain store.

All this is pretty par for the course for this show, things regularly got that goofily complicated or occasionally much moreso. It was really funny, and consistent. Not just once, but several times during the show’s run, stunts Fielder set up for episodes in production went viral on the internet or even in the news media by themselves, before the episodes aired, with nobody realizing until later on that they were staged for a comedy TV show.