YMMV / Nathan for You

• Adorkable: Nathan himself is very endearing thanks to his awkwardness and Literal-Minded-ness.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Brian Wolfe's insult to Nathan that he's "the wizard of loneliness" seems to be completely random and bizarre. He's actually referencing The Wizard of Loneliness, a 1988 film (based on a 1966 novel) starring Lukas Haas and Lea Thompson, about a young boy who copes with his poor social skills through a vibrant fantasy life.
• Award Snub: Many people thought Nathan would receive some Emmy nominations for season 4, with "Finding Frances" getting numerous accolades as one of the best TV moments of 2017. Nathan, in his usual twisted fashion, tried to get the attention of Emmy voters with a video showing how easily the Emmy voting can be hacked. But the show ended up getting 0 nominations.
• Crosses the Line Twice:
  • A lot of the show's Cringe Comedy falls under this trope. Notable examples from season 3 include the "I love you"/"again" rehearsal scene in "Smokers Allowed" and the attempts to use Holocaust awareness as a marketing point for Summit Ice jackets in "Horseback Riding/Man Zone".
  • During the Holiday season, the Summit Ice website had a GIF of Santa dancing across the screen (which if you positioned the picture correctly on your browser, made it look like Santa was exiting the gates of a concentration camp).
  • In part 1 of the Season 2 episode "Pet Store/Maid Service", Nathan tries to help a struggling pet shop gain customers by erecting a gravestone at a pet cemetery doubling as a blatant advertisement for the pet store. While this would normally be a tasteless thing to do, the lengths that he goes to to accomplish this, including declaring a fly in his office as his pet and caring for it until it dies, holding a ceremony for it (complete with an officiating rabbi) at the cemetery after said death, and ordering a gravestone with giant lettering that towers over all of the others in the cemetery (and which in total cost about $7,000 to carve out), make the entire endeavor hilarious.
• Cult Classic: Never a ratings blockbuster, but it attracted a rabidly-loyal fanbase.
• Diagnosed by the Audience: Nathan's crippling lack of social skills, as well as his tendency to misread situations and his monotone voice, have made many fans consider his persona to be based on autism. While Fielder researched Asperger's syndrome while fine-tuning the persona, he himself rejects any suggestion that the character is actually on the spectrum.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Retired judge Anthony Filosa appeared in each of the four seasons as Nathan's legal adviser. He became a fan favorite for more-or-less playing the role of Only Sane Man in the show's world, offering sober, tactful legal analyses of Nathan's craziest ideas, while still clearly being amused by the stuff Nathan was trying to pull. There was a lot genuine sadness after Nathan announced that Filosa had passed away in the summer of 2018.
  • Elle from "Electronics Store" seems to be a favorite Girl of the Week, for her Perky Goth personality and her willingness to call Nathan out for his Comedic Sociopathy.
  • And of course Bill Heath, who went from a handful of appearances "impersonating" Bill Gates to co-starring in the Grand Finale "Finding Frances".
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • With How To With John Wilson. Both star awkward but endearing creators as themselves as they meet wacky characters and find themselves in bizarre situations. This is helped by the fact that Nathan is the producer and advertised the series.
  • Unsurprisingly, many fans of the series are also fans of Fielder's later show The Rehearsal due to both featuring Nathan as himself and having similar premises and senses of humor.
  • Fans of this show are often fans of the band The Banzai Predicament and the short film The Web, both also created by Nathan.
• Genius Bonus:
  • The "royalty-free football" playing on the TV in the "Man Zone" at the clothing store is a USFL game from The '80s (a league that in hindsight seems like a very Nathanesque idea).
  • The Arkansas Razorbacks football game Bill remembers during hypnosis in "Finding Frances" was the 1969 game against Texas, considered one of the greatest games in college football history.
  • The episode where Nathan hires a Michael Richards impersonator to help a restaurant get publicity has a suitably Seinfeldesque episode title: "The Richards Tip".
  • While Nathan having the actress in "Smokers Allowed" repeatedly tell him "I love you" is meant to be a Continuity Nod to his ongoing loneliness and awkward dealings with women, it's also not that different from the type of repetition-based acting exercises that legendary acting coach Sanford Meisner pioneered to train performers to act more instinctively and not focus so much on the meaning of dialogue.
• Harsher in Hindsight: "Finding Francis" focuses on a Bill Gates impersonator obsessed with his lost love. In 2021, the real Bill Gates and his wife would divorce.
• Heartwarming Moments: See here.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: "The Anecdote" naturally causes this to occur to everyone who watched the interview that the episode centers around before the episode itself aired. The revelation that Nathan's fun talk show anecdote was in fact a minutely telegraphed and very convoluted scheme concocted solely for the purpose of having a fun talk show anecdote (right down to the "I look like some kind of Dick Tracy villain" quip) is the kind of jaw-dropping humor that only Nathan For You could pull off.
• I Knew It!: When Dumb Starbucks first went viral, a commenter at laist.com correctly guessed that Nathan was the mastermind (around that time speculation was centering on Banksy, some unspecified person disgruntled with fair use laws, and even Starbucks itself attempting a viral marketing scheme).
• Memetic Mutation: A common joke online is to attribute bizarre or nonsensical actions by businesses or governments to Nathan and one of his plans.
• Older Than They Think:
  • In 2008 a Minnesota bar tried the same Loophole Abuse that Nathan used as the basis for the "Smokers Allowed" episode.
  • Nathan's scheme of paying actors to attend funerals with a low turnout and mourn is actually Older Than Feudalism.
  • Nathan went through an elaborate scheme to get a smoke detector labeled as a musical instrument. A smoke alarm was used by Ricky Wilson on Planet Claire by The B-52s way back in 1979.
• Too Good to Last: A case of the creator pulling the plug on the show, since Fielder openly admitted that as the series went on it got tougher and tougher to conceive and execute his schemes, partly because of the need for Serial Escalation and partly because it was getting more difficult to find people who weren't aware of the show.

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