Movies & Shows To Watch Before Nathan Fielder's Big Screen Debut in You Can See Everything
Nathan Fielder has just announced a shock jump to the big screen with You Can See Everything, a documentary set for theatrical release in October that was reportedly shot in secret over three years with the disgraced Theranos founder, Elizabeth Holmes. The plan? Go see it as soon as humanly possible.
This is all very exciting and very out of the blue. In early September, as the Venice Film Festival edged towards its close and similar events in Toronto and New York started rolling out their red carpets, the most ecstatically shared piece of movie news actually came out of Telluride, where a secret premiere for Fielder's film (an A24 release) had taken place. This was quickly followed by the release of a trailer online, which shows Fielder and Holmes having an intense staring contest on what looks like her couch, and which immediately went viral.
Holmes, of course, went to prison in 2023 for fraud charges relating to her time in charge of Theranos, a company that falsely claimed to have invented an in-house blood testing machine and scammed investors and customers out of billions of dollars — which naturally makes her an ideal subject for Fielder, who has been at his best when examining the boundaries of reality and performance in his work.
If you’re looking for what to catch up on before You Can See Everything drops in October, look no further than the list below, which is arranged in chronological order.
If you want to follow the creative arc of Fielder’s career — how his singular, sometimes profound and usually hilarious ideas have developed over time — the only place to start is Nathan For You: a show that is basically three seasons of increasingly complex attempts to help people and businesses with relatively banal problems.
The show ended almost a decade ago, yet some of the episodes are still among the strangest and most inventive things he’s ever done — from founding a Holocaust awareness brand with Summit Ice to the surprisingly moving finale, Finding Francis.
Fielder had early successes with appearances on Canadian comedy shows like This Hour Has 22 Minutes and Jon Benjamin has a Van, but Nathan for You created the ethos, the mission statement, and his brand.
If you're thinking of watching Fielder’s Elizabeth Holmes doc, it's probably a good idea to brush up on her story as well. And when it comes to non-fiction movies that are riveting and informative in equel measure, you can’t go wrong with the work of Alex Gibney.
The Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room filmmaker just blew away the Venice Film Festival with his 3.5 hour epic on Elon Musk, but The Inventor, a 2019 examination of everything that happened with Holmes and Theranos, is still one of his finest achievements.
On its surface, How To with John Wilson probably shares the least connective tissue with You Can See Everything out of the shows and docs on this list, but if you make it through the rest of them and are still looking for some of that Fielder-coded humour, you won't be disappointed.
Produced by Fielder, it follows the eponymous and awkwardly hilarious documentarian John Wilson as he shares his idiosyncratic thoughts and musing about New York City — with episodes on everything from scaffolding to small talk to public restrooms. An incessant documenter, Wilson pieces his stories together from hours of footage that he shoots while also unearthing the kind of communities that will remind you of the funnier episodes of Louis Theroux’s Weird Weekends.
The other Elizabeth Holmes study that we can recommend in preparation for Fielder’s new movie is the 2022 miniseries The Dropout, in which the former Silicon Valley golden girl is played quite brilliantly by Amanda Seyfried.
The Disney+ show, like many a Silicon Valley cautionary tale (think WeCrashed), follows the Theranos founder from her idealistic early days (when comparisons to Steve Jobs were not infrequent) all the way up to her Icarian downfall. It’s a maddeningly bingeable show that is also frequently just plain maddening.
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If Nathan For You was Fielder’s Ok Computer, then The Rehearsal is like his Kid A — i.e. the kind of project where a creator takes everything they've learned and reimagines it into something more grandiose and expansive.
Like Nathan For You, The Rehearsal essentially starts out with with Fielder earnestly trying to help regular people with their problems, using the considerable resources of HBO to solve the most mundane requests you can imagine in the most elaborate ways — like reconstructing an entire New York bar on set just so a man can work up the courage to tell his trivia team that he lied to them.
Without giving too much away, The Rehearsal has only gotten more mind-blowing with each passing episode — the second series might be the most incredible thing I saw last year.
In The Curse, you get to see Fielder do something that a lot of people basically thought he was doing all along: play a fictional character.
The Curse is Fielder's first strictly narrative TV show, but that doesn’t mean it’s not got that hyper-specific energy that we expect from a Fielder joint. Set in New Mexico (it is similar in a lot of ways to Ari Aster's Eddington, but in the style of a Safdie movie) it follows a husband and wife (Fielder and Emma Stone) as they attempt to set up a sustainable housing business in a low income area.
Like Holmes, Stone’s character in The Curse is also something of a lowkey tech huckster, so it will be interesting to see if some of Fielder's ideas for the show came from the time he spent with Holmes for You Can See Everything (but that’s just a hunch). The Curse can be a little cruel and bleak at times, but with most episodes directed by Benny Safdie, who also plays a TV producer on the show, it is never short on style or provocation.
