Nearly a year since Nathan Fielder announced that his legendary Comedy Central series Nathan For You would not be returning for a fifth season, we finally have an idea of where we’ll be able to see Fielder doing weird, awkward comedy next. According to Variety, Fielder has signed a one-year deal with HBO that will allow him to act as an executive producer on a docu-series about an anxious New Yorker as well as write, direct, and star in a comedy pilot of his own. We don’t know anything about the comedy pilot other than that, but it seems safe to assume that it will retain the weird, not-for-everyone sense of humor that Fielder brought to his Comedy Central show.
We know plenty about the docu-series, though: Titled How To…With John Wilson, the series will follow the eponymous Wilson (a “lo-fi” filmmaker known for his “diaristic images” of New York) as he tries to give “everyday advice while dealing with his own personal issues.” He also “covertly documents the lives of fellow New Yorkers” in what Variety bills as a “comic odyssey of self-discovery” that will make the audience “comfortable with the awkward contradictions of modern life.” It certainly sounds like something Fielder would want to be involved with.
That all being said, we theorized last year when Fielder announced the end of his show that he could’ve just been setting the stage for another absurd Dumb Starbucks-style mega-prank, and nothing in this Variety report makes that sound any less likely. In fact, we wouldn’t be surprised if season five of Nathan For You ended up being whatever happens behind the scenes of these two shows, and the Nathan For You Twist is that you can only see it if you… happen to be behind the scenes on these two shows.