Nathan Fielder, who is promoting the season finale of Nathan For You (which airs tonight) appeared on Chris Hardwick’s Nerdist podcast this week, and he ended up offering a lot of fun anecdotes about some of the behind-the-scenes difficulties with the show. He wouldn’t specify which segment, but he talked about — for instance — one time when they pushed the comedy of discomfort too far and really upset one of the participants, which he now regrets. He says the show has become much better at “managing people.”
Asked if he knows of any of the people who continue to use the business ideas he provided, he admitted that the caricature artist who decided to make wildly offensive caricatures still continues to do that for certain events with adults. Fielder also spent some time talking about some of his favorite segments, the challenges they have in production, the conflicts they sometimes run into with advertisers, and how segment ideas evolve.
In fact, the Dumb Starbucks segment began as something else entirely, and he talked at length about the original idea for the segment, noting that he still may end up using the idea for a later episode.
Basically, the original idea was to help an adult video store struggling because everyone buys their porn online because it’s anonymous and no one wants to be seen walking into an adult video store.
“If you could make walking into an adult video store anonymous, more people might come … So, the idea was to change the storefront into a Starbucks and people would eventually come in expecting coffee, and we’d be like, ‘Why don’t we just sell coffee, as well?’ And then people would want pastries with their coffee, and we’d sell pastries, too. Eventually, the porn just gets moved to the back room, and then you end up with just basically a Starbucks.”
“That was the idea for a long time. But I remember it bugged me a little bit that it was fully illegal to just make a Starbucks, you know I mean? And I don’t like ideas that much where there’s some major hole in it where it was so obvious that it just wouldn’t work, so we were trying to think of a way to make this legal, and someone was talking about parody, or porn parody … and then we changed it to helping a struggling coffee shop and using parody law to have him have brand recognition.”
It’s interesting to hear how a segment idea evolves, but it really would’ve been cool to see how they could’ve managed the original idea, and I do hope they attempt to do it from another angle using something different than a Starbucks. Again, though, I have no idea how you get around the fact that it’s also completely illegal.
Source: Nerdist
