Nathan for You
“Finding Frances”, Season 4 Episode 8
Requested By
EdwinSorrow on our Discord server
What do I know about this series going into it?
I’d never heard of it before - but in an example of the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon, I’ve randomly encountered it several times since it was requested. I know that it is partially a documentary, but also partially fictional in some manner, upon which EdwinSorrow did not elaborate. The titular Nathan is played by (or just is) one “Nathan Fielder”.
While clicking through I saw that this episode involves a Bill Gates impersonator.
Recap
August 2015. The producers of the show, Michael Koman and star Nathan Fielder, sit down to record a commentary track for DVD release. For one of those commentary tracks they have as a guest Bill Heath, the aforementioned Bill Gates impersonator, who had appeared in that episode in a bit part.
But Bill is distracted during the recording. He takes a telemarketing call from AT&T, and goes on a tangent about Frances Gaddy, a woman he fell in love with but never married because of his mother’s objections. And he never saw her again.
After the recording, Bill keeps showing up at the TV production’s office at random and mentioning Frances, hint hint. It’s emphasized that he’s a fan of the Arkansas Razorbacks; I don’t know if this will become relevant.
Eventually, Nathan decides to take up the challenge: find Frances Gaddy. But who knows if she got remarried and has a new surname now? There are 600,000 women in the US named Frances.
He takes Bill aside: why do you want to find her? Bill claims that he wants to “fill in the gaps”, whatever that means, and confess certain things to her. But then he also admits that maybe he wants to marry her, the way he should’ve done so many years ago. If, of course, she’s not already married now.
“I want to use the resources of my show to find Frances,” Nathan offers, making it official. Bill looks surprised, as if this wasn’t exactly what he’s been hinting towards for weeks.
He provides as much information as he can: After they broke up, Frances got married on the rebound to someone named Charles (last name unknown), then got divorced. She may have married again since. She is (or was) 5’7”, brown hair, brown eyes. Bill provides a sketch of her from memory that is little better than a stick figure1.
The last place Bill saw her was the Moses Melody Shop a record store in Little Rock, Arkansas, at which he worked at the time. He was leaving to try for a career in Hollywood; she had cried and said she would love him forever. (I thought he said his mother broke them up?)
I don’t understand why they’re pointlessly wandering around a former record store. Does he not remember where she lived? The first thing I’d check is the county property records - find out who bought the house from her (or her parents) and see if there was a forwarding address.
The only other thing Bill can remember is that she went to Dumas High School. So they sleep in a hotel and plan to head there in the morning and look at the student records.
Unfortunately, Dumas High School doesn’t agree to let them come by; their policy is that only parents of current students can enter the campus.
But Nathan gets an idea. A Matthew McConaughey2 movie called Mud was shot in Dumas, which the small town takes as a point of pride. So they’ll pretend they’re shooting a sequel and leverage that to get access to the high school.
He finds an actor from the original movie - a guy who appeared for three seconds on the back of a motorcycle and had no lines - and hires him to boost their bona fides. They get permission to enter the high school and head to the library. Then they claim, rather implausibly, that the sequel to Mud is going to be a 1950s period film, and ask to borrow an old yearbook to get photographic references for the props department. In one of the yearbooks, they find a picture of Frances Gaddy.
They fly an age progression expert named Cornelius Ladd out to Arkansas, give him the yearbook picture, and ask him to generate an image of what Frances might look like today.
Using this image, they hang a fairly horrifying series of posters on trees around town: Have you seen this woman?
In the meantime, Bill decides to stop paying to stay in a hotel and instead move in with his niece, who still lives in the area. When Nathan interviews the niece, she confirms that her grandmother had prevented Bill from marrying Frances. But she also says Bill is very good at maintaining contact with people, and it’s weird that Frances is an exception. And she also doesn’t know of him doing Bill Gates impersonations prior to his first appearance on Nathan’s show… DUN DUN DUN…
So Nathan confronts him.
Bill says he’s been doing Bill Gates impersonations for only four years. But in his previous appearance on the show he said he did it for a living…
Nathan asks him right out: Were you Frances’s stalker? Bill says no, but the soundtrack does its best Psycho impression.
The next day, Nathan gets a phone call from someone who saw the poster and thinks it might be his great-grandmother, named Frances.
They meet the caller, get the address, and drive out to Frances’s house.
The rule of comedy says they’re going to ring the bell, she’ll come to the door, and they’ll immediately turn around and say oh, sorry, it’s not her, without even bothering to talk to her.
Well, she isn’t the Frances they were looking for - but she invites them in anyway. Bill asks to use the bathroom. “How was her bathroom?” Nathan asks awkwardly on the way home.
While they wait for more responses, Nathan emails Frances’s classmates, but most of them are dead or don’t answer. In the meantime, Bill attends his high school reunion. Which gives Nathan an idea: organize a high school reunion for Frances (they didn’t go to the same school), and have Bill attend as if he’s “Alex Sanford”, one of the other students.
(Bill’s high school reunion raises a question: Did none of Bill’s friends know Frances? Could he not ask them about her?)
As preparation for the reunion, Nathan creates flashcards based on the stolen yearbook and quizzes Bill on the other students so he can pretend to have been in her class. What they don’t consider is: What if the real Alex Sanford shows up? Or what if one of the other students knows that the real Alex is dead?
But the reunion is a bust: Nobody has heard anything from her.
Later, while hunting through storage boxes in his sister’s house, Bill finds a collection of letters sent to him from Frances. And although the letters do prove that Frances had been madly in love with him, they also accuse Bill of cheating with “Gloria”, and make the claim that she doesn’t truly know him… DUN DUN DUN…
Nathan takes Bill to undergo regression hypnosis - which is pseudoscientific nonsense, and proves to be useless. And in the meantime, Nathan continues reading the letters, which grow more accusatory: he was pressuring her to have sex before marriage and to push her farther than she was willing to go. He starts to get worried: how is Bill going to act if/when they find Frances? So in order to test how Bill acts around women, Nathan sets him up with an escort. Bill turns the escort down, so Nathan meets her instead just to interview her.
This is a strange digression.
Nathan shows the escort bits of his show. And then, wthout any leads to follow, he gets bored over the days and weeks in Arkansas. So he hires the escort again, and again, just to hang out, and eventually even to make out in a hotel room (merely repeatedly kissing in a very strange, almost metronomic kind of way).
What is going on here?! The only thing I can imagine is that at some point they’ll discover that the escort, Maci, is coincidentally Frances’s granddaughter.
Back to the actual plot. While calling around to local cemeteries, they eventually find what may be Gaddy’s parents’ graves. Bill recognizes the father’s name, so they go to the public library and look up the obituary on microfilm. It says that James Gaddy is survived by a “Frances Munroe” who lives in Michigan. Looking up Frances Munroe’s Facebook page, they find it confirms her high school and year of graduation. They’ve found her!
But, disappointingly, she is married, a fact that weighs heavily on Bill’s mind. He starts to obsess over the husband, disparaging him even though he doesn’t know him, and declaring that he still wants to go to Michigan to meet her. “She could get a divorce and marry me,” Bill suggests. Nathan is weirded out. “She said she’d love me to her grave,” Bill repeats over and over.
Nathan eventually decides that he has to let Bill do this. But he wants to make sure, first, that things won’t go very wrong. So he hires an actress to act as Frances, and has her and Bill playact the scene in which he arrives at her door unannounced. Bill is immediately far too touchy-feely. Creepy. Desperate.
So Nathan has them switch roles: Bill will play Frances. This forces Bill to see the situation from her perspective, so that the next time he plays himself he is more self-effacing, more humble, more apologetic.
Deciding Bill is ready, they fly up to Michigan and drive to Frances’s house. But Bill is suddenly hesitant. Do I really just walk up to her door and ring the bell? Nathan, you and the cameras should come up with me. Nathan refuses to freak Frances out with cameras on her doorstep without advance warning3, so Bill has to call her first. Which he does.
Bill, in his nervousness, asks over and over if Frances recognizes his voice without giving his name. When he finally identifies himself, she doesn’t sound particularly emotional about him, for good or for ill. She treats it like a casual conversation, catching up with an old friend after many years. She clearly hasn’t been obsessing about him like he has about her. And she’s been married for 47 years, with nine grandchildren.
By the end of the conversation Bill has accepted that she has her life. He won’t show up at her door after all. Back at the hotel, Bill kills a bee that was loose in the room.
Much later, Bill shows up at Nathan’s office and brings him a serving tray as a thank-you gift. He also asks to date the actress who played Frances when he was practicing. Nathan readily agrees, calls her, and arranges a date. And Nathan flies out to Arkansas to meet with the escort again.
Unresolved questions
Why did Bill lie, in his first appearance on the show, about how long he had done Bill Gates impersonation? Was it really a misunderstanding or had he been planning all along to get Nathan to reunite him with Frances?
What exactly had Bill done with Gloria? What did Frances mean when she said she “didn’t know him”? Why did they really break up, and who broke up with whom?
What was Frances’s reaction to seeing the episode on television and realizing that Bill had been planning to break up her marriage and was right outside her house during the phone call?
What did the Dumas city council and high school do when they saw the episode on television and realized that they’d been had?
Will Nathan mistake paying an escort to spend time with him for a genuine relationship?
Ratings
These ratings evaluate the finale-of-the-week from an angle that its writers never intended: how well it works as an individual episode watched in isolation. The analysis accompanying each rating is written from that point of view as well.
The ratings do not necessarily apply to the episode if it is watched in the proper context. And it should go without saying that none of them apply to the series as a whole, which I have not watched.
Story: 3/10. A straightforward story with very few twists and turns. Unfortunately the numerous pointless digressions are a major drawback. We didn’t need to spend a full minute watching Maci and Nathan kissing each other like a pair of fish, nor a full minute watching Bill chase a bee around the hotel room. Scenes like these contributed nothing to the episode’s theme or to the characters, nor were they sufficiently developed to be subplots. The only actual subplot, the question of whether Bill was lying and why he mysteriously didn’t keep in contact with Frances despite how he manages the rest of his life, never went anywhere.
Writing: 4/10. It’s very odd to evaluate the writing of this show when I have no idea how much (if any) of it was real and how much (if any) of it was scripted4. However, I will treat every inclusion as deliberate, regardless of whether it emerged from the mind of God or the mind of man.
I burst out laughing multiple times over the episode, starting with when Nathan turned the notebook to reveal Bill’s sketch to the camera. The really awful script in the audition scene - where it was clearly built solely from the word Mud, the number 2, and the need to gain entrance to the school library - had me in stitches. The subtle joke that this sequel was going to be a 1950s period piece was hilarious. And I really liked the parallel between Nathan bringing back this random side character from earlier in his own show, and using, in his plot, a random side actor from the movie5.
Unfortunately, the episode didn’t maintain the high standards it showed during the first half hour. As soon as the characters started to grow aimless, the episode grew aimless as well, and it never really recovered its footing. Even after Nathan remembered what he was supposed to be doing, it felt like we were just going through the motions.
Production: 8/10. Good acting (though, again, I don’t know if you can really call it acting). Good use of the episode score, especially in the “Is Bill a stalker?” scene; it’s too bad that didn’t really go anywhere. Very good camera work.
Characterization: 4/10. There are only two real characters of consequence.
Bill’s psyche was explored in some depth but, unfortunately, the episode didn’t quite explore as deeply as I would have liked.
I don’t think I got a real handle on Nathan. It’s hard to put into words exactly why; it felt like he was playing a character who was also playing a character. He was trying to be deadpan and reactionless while at the same time trying to express horror at the things Bill was saying and doing, a combination that didn’t work particularly well.
Accessibility: 10/10. The episode was completely self-enclosed. Other than the nagging question of how much of this was even real, it’s easy to follow everything that happens while knowing literally nothing about Nathan or Bill coming in. (I even harbor a sneaking suspicion that the “previous episode that featured Bill” doesn’t exist.)
Closure: 3/10. Bill himself actually got a lot of closure, 9/10-level closure. But as the last episode of Nathan’s series it’s rather lacking. It gets a couple of points for callbacks, always an important part of a finale: bringing back a (potentially made-up) previous guest and Nathan showing Maci clips from other episodes. But there’s very little here that smacks of a grand finale.
Do I want to watch the series now?
There’s potential here - enormous potential. Had the episode ended half an hour in, it would have scored significantly higher. It went downhill as it lost focus, but I’ll be happy to watch another episode or two to see if they held themselves together better. I enjoyed a lot of the humor and would be happy to give it another shot.
Is there a series finale you’d like me to review? Join our Discord or leave a comment below.
This only occurred to me while editing my notes, but Nathan could have taken him to a sketch artist.
Can’t he and Bill go together while the cameras hang back?
At least according to the end credits, the characters’ names are the actors’ real names, but that doesn’t tell me much.
I don’t even know if this is a real movie or not.
As a fan of Nathan For You, I agree that the finale is pretty weak. Though it seems like a majority of fans think it's a masterpiece.