In the spirit of Nathan Fielder's work comes "Paul T. Goldman," a hybrid docuseries about a true weirdo. Jason Woliner, director of multiple episodes of Fielder's "Nathan for You" as well as 2020's "Borat" sequel, came across his subject after Goldman tweeted to Woliner that he had a story that badly needed dramatization. Taking inspiration from Goldman's book, which makes exaggerated characterizations of his ex-wife's motives and behavior, Woliner begins filming a fictionalized version of Goldman's story, with actors playing everyone except Goldman, who plays himself. same.
Goldman's story begins when he meets a woman who proposes, first, that they seek marriage and, second, that they only live as a married couple for part of the week. In his optimistic and confident account, Goldman agrees, all before, growing in his frustration, he uncovers a web of falsehood.
Stars: Natasha Blasick, Stewart J. Zully, Natasha Sill
Having Goldman play his story seems at first like a scheme worthy of "Nathan for You," the series in which Fielder placed notoriously weird or curious people in situations designed to reward his unique qualities. Here, however, the game seems a bit too obvious, since there's no second strike here, there's no reason for Goldman to play it all out other than to explore an unusual personality. For a show with a premise that seems chewily self-referential, here, too much motivation to find Goldman a perfect subject seems to exist on the surface.
And Goldman's story fades as he tells himself. The odd details about him matter much less than his aggressive self-confidence and unusual personal qualities; it's hard not to notice that, for all his ambition to be on camera, he's gangly and clumsy, because Woliner keeps drawing our attention to him. A disclaimer at the top of the series states that Goldman's claims are "speculation or opinion." But what he says has less to do with the story than how he says it, or how Woliner can turn it into such convoluted metafiction that it occasionally overshadows how fundamentally uninteresting the fiction itself is.
Whatever the truth of Goldman's predicament, the details of which unfold, slowly, into big crime storytelling that Peacock would probably consider spoiler territory, he sometimes seems unaware that his statements are being picked up, spit out, and turned into embarrassments and presented to the viewer. At one point, he comments, of the botched adaptation of his life story, "It's a shame we're not making a movie, because that would mean...Oscars"; he sadly concludes that he will have to settle for an Emmy. Later, he rhetorically asks "wouldn't he have made a good pimp or what?" He trails off, muttering, "Giving instructions to the girls..."
The generous look of “Paul T. Goldman” could indicate that, in him, Woliner has found a vessel through which to explore our all-too-human delusions, our vanities, and our tendency to let ourselves be fooled too easily. And, in the "Nathan for You" era, a show he greatly admired, he would have been more amenable to that view. But Woliner's "Borat Next Moviefilm," the production of which completely fooled at least one well-meaning person minding his own business, as well as Fielder's later series "The Rehearsal," have soured me on this genre. "People are amazing" is a point that can easily be made, indeed, a point that until recently was made by a large percentage of narrative art, without attracting people who mistakenly think that the camera and the man behind it she is her friends.