I’m beginning to think since the show’s inception this has been an elaborate ploy for Nathan to make friends and find a girlfriend
I always get sad when Nathan brings up not having a girlfriend, etc. since his divorce. He actually sounds crushed and sad, and not playing a character. From the Rolling Stone interview in September: While Fielder's TV self is chronically single, the real Fielder was married to a children's librarian he knew from Canada – until they divorced in 2014. It's a painful subject he refuses to discuss in detail. "Any breakup is hard," he says, clearly desperate to move on from the topic. "It was tough."
I've seen a few episodes of this show but I'm gonna watch it all now. Getting caught up on season four before going back and finishing up the previous eps The first episode of the new season is absolutely hilarious. How does he come up with these ideas?
I think the bigger question is, how does he find these people? The gas rebate one has got to perplex me the most.
I feel like the question of “this can’t possibly be real?” comes up all the time for newcomers of this show. I think it’s 2 things: 1) this is Los Angeles and some of these people see the camera and are desperate for screen time at any cost. That means a person will play along or go with a situation for an absolutely absurd amount of time and try to act normal, which makes these ridiculous situations all the more crazy as they try to act cool. 2) There really are straight up crazy people out there...who in the world browses CraigsList for some of these things? And who answers them?
check his chat with Bill Simmons on his podcast, gives you a bit of a better perspective on the situation and what happened with Rolling Stone
As well as these reasons I think there's probably a lot of clever editing going on. Especially in terms of shooting an absolute tonne of footage and cherry picking the gems. As a side note, I remember when my friend first recommended this to me, I assumed it was all scripted and the people he interacted with were actors and I was really surprised that they were all real. It didn't make it any less hilarious.