The very premise of the show is creepy to some viewers, with Nathan disturbingly but perfectly recreating situations and locations. This gets creepier as the show goes on and the rehearsals become even more of a Mind Screw.
- Episode 4 features a dark and shockingly realistic storyline within the rehearsals where Adam turns to drugs due to Nathan's neglect. Adam's drug overdose and Nathan's reaction were also scarily realistic.
- It gets even darker in retrospect once you read a profile of Fielder done to promote the show in which it becomes apparent the breakdown he suffers eerily mirrors a real-life incident in which Fielder- then going through a divorce- had an actual nervous breakdown during a meeting with Comedy Central execs. Meaning that Fielder put into motion a series of events for him to re-live his own traumatic experience on national television.
- In many episodes, participants in rehearsals interact with people they don't know are actors, including complex simulations involving performers posing as everyday people such as police officers and construction workers. Notably, in Episode 3, Nathan engineers a genuine friendship between rehearsal participant Patrick and an elderly man he doesn't know is an actor, then "kills" the man to force Patrick to deal with suppressed emotions regarding his own grandfather's death. Could you be inside a rehearsal right now?
- In 'The Fielder Method,' Nathan instructs his acting students to spend one day surreptitiously following someone, then introduce themselves to that person another day and try to learn as much about them as possible so they can mimic them in a future acting class. As one of the students points out, this technically constitutes stalking.
- "Pretend Daddy" features a lot of terrifying moments that would resonate with parents, as Nathan accidentally traumatizes a 6-year-old named Remy by making him think he was his father. Nathan and Remy's mother are both genuinely horrified at this.
- The conclusion of "Pretend Daddy" is also horrifying - it suggests Nathan has gone so far down the rabbit hole of his rehearsals that he has completely lost track of reality, and you can see him struggling to grapple with that on screen. This introduces one final, dreadful question - is Nathan just convincingly playing the pastiche parody of himself in that moment, or did the real life human being Nathan Fielder genuinely lose track of reality?
