Little Rock and other parts of Arkansas served as the backdrop for the season finale of Nathan For You, Comedy Central’s popular docu-reality series originally premised on an awkward business school graduate helping struggling firms implement outlandish schemes to drum up sales.
In the two-hour Season 4 finale that premiered Thursday night, comedian Nathan Fielder decided to help a Bill Gates impersonator with a history of appearances on the show track down a love interest he hadn’t spoken to in decades.
Their first stop: Little Rock, the impersonator’s hometown and the place he last saw his one-time girlfriend, Frances Gaddy, many years earlier. The show followed the pair landing at Bill and Hillary Clinton National Airport/Adams Field and then making their way around town. They drove by the impersonator’s alma mater, Central High School, stayed at the Legacy Hotel and Suites (which has since been remodeled and rebranded as Hotel Frederica), drank at Dizzy’s Gypsy Bistro bar, researched obituaries at Central Arkansas Library System's main campus, and even rented out the downtown Studio Theatre to rehearse how a reunion with the lost love might go.
At one point, the pair — Fielder and impersonator Bill Heath — visited Downtown Wigs & Fashions on Little Rock’s Main Street, the former location of Moses Melody Shop. That’s where Heath said he was working the last time he saw Gaddy.
The pair also ventured outside Little Rock, including a trip to Dumas High School to try to get a copy of a 1950s yearbook with Gaddy’s photo in it. After initially being told only parents of students are allowed on the campus, Fielder devised a plan to pose as a filmmaker shooting a sequel to the 2012 movie Mud, which he called Mud 2: Never Cleaner.
The plan, playing on residents’ pride in the fact that the real Mud was shot in the area, worked — or at least, the show presented it that way — and the pair gained access to the school library and left with a copy of the yearbook.
In previous episodes of Nathan for You, Fielder opened a coffee shop called Dumb Starbucks, copying everything about the iconic coffee chain and suggesting the Dumb moniker made it a parody that prevented it from being sued for copyright infringement. In another episode, he created a faux viral video that purported to show a pig saving a drowning goat in a bid to bring more tourists to a petting zoo.
The full episode featuring Little Rock is available on the Comedy Central website.