Nathan Fielder’s Comedy Central series Nathan For You is already kind of bleak, what with Fielder playing a lonely, well-meaning version of himself who’s desperate to make friends (or more) with every unwitting business owner he’s ostensibly showed up to help. Now, a new web series from Super Deluxe and Marcel The Shell With Shoes On co-creator Dean Fleischer-Camp has tapped even further into that air of broken-robot desperation, casting Fielder in the starring role of David.
The series kicks off with a darkly comic tarot reading that culminates in the title character—a jobless, divorced sadsack—being told that there’s a rock growing in his heart that will kill him in just five weeks. Thrust into crisis, Fielder’s character listlessly turns to (and is failed by) every single institution in his life, from religion, to medicine, to the supposedly fun distraction of sports. Meanwhile, every character in the show’s universe speaks with Fielder’s usual flat affect, from his doctor, to the park ranger at the “suicide forest” that keeps cropping up in newspaper headlines, to his ex-wife, played by Jenny Slate. (Given that Slate and Fleischer-Camp divorced last year, meanwhile, there’s something darkly personal about the scene where David tells her “I’m sorry I didn’t love you as much as I said I would.”)
David is hard to categorize—the jokes are bone dry and sporadically placed—but if you’re a fan of the darker edges of Fielder’s comedy, you might want to check it out. All five episodes (adding up to about 27 minutes total) are available on Super Deluxe today.