notbang answered:

my main criticism is that s2 nathaniel is so vastly different to s3 and s4 nathaniel in a way that doesn’t feel like character development so much as inconsistent writing, and i tend to be bitter about this because i find s2 nathaniel the more interesting iteration.

i don’t think the writers room had a shared understanding of his character - for example, how rich is nathaniel? his apartment doesn’t have a kitchen is sleek and nice but relatively small. he drinks in the daytime at a kids baseball establishment wearing sweat pants, is confused by ‘middle class’ games nights, and apparently also attends royal weddings and hunts ducks in his spare time. whether they want to paint him as a relatable everyman, well-to-do, old-money lawyer or some kind of out of touch millionaire oscillates willy-nilly between episodes.

probably the most glaring fumble to me is his descent into petulance and rudeness in s4. if you look at s2 nathaniel, his whole deal is business and maintaining a perfect outward appearance. even though he’s threatening to fire everybody in 2x09, once rebecca secures the money, he lets the issue go true to his word. he’s not firing people to be an asshole, he’s firing people because Business. firing george, however, IS an act of assholery, and this still is done in a cool, calm and collected manner. when darryl tries to stage an uprising over the candy, he doesn’t get mad, he rolls his eyes and tells them to get back to work. if s2 nathaniel is rude, it’s in a very composed and cultivated way, because he is all about appearances. s2 nathaniel would never in a million years refuse to speak to a high profile client the way he does in 4x03!!!! he would never speak so rudely the way he does in 4x06! i get that his infatuation with rebecca leads to a loss of composure but it just doesn’t work for me. he’s an uptight wasp, and if he’s going to be rude, it’s going to be via scathing passive aggression! (and while we’re at it, there’s no way he doesn’t understand that kissing bert on the forehead is weird. he’s plenty affectionate with rebecca. he’s repressed, not stupid. that almost kiss fake out should have been with heather and i WILL die mad about it.)

it’s also like they realised at the start of s4 that he hadn’t fallen far enough to have a satisfying arc of growth, so they tried to make him worse in a way that didn’t ring true. in as early as s2 darryl, tim and jim feel comfortable enough to risk nathaniel’s wrath when they try to coax him into a nap. in 3x10 when rebecca wants them to revolt against nathaniel, none of them are particularly interested because he’s been fine, actually. so why do we suddenly jump to them being terrified of him in s4? the leap is just as lazy as his yelling ‘i’m nice now!’ - though at least the case there is that that’s the whole joke.

s2 also set up a wonderful adoptive father/son dynamic between darryl and nathaniel that could have been the perfect way for nathaniel to examine his toxic masculinity except that it went absolutelynowhere. this is particularly frustrating because nathaniel occupies a lot of screen time, yet doesn’t really ever have much of a storyline independent of rebecca. all we really get is that he has issues with his parents, but they don’t do much with that except rehash the same conflict with his father, twice, without pushing it anywhere new or interesting. it felt like his s4 arc needed to be about breaking free from his father (and think of the humour that would have been inherent in nathaniel having to suddenly navigate life on a budget!) but we only got a snippet of that in a flashback to a phone call in the finale. ceg could have done so much more with a lot of its characters, but it’s a real bummer that, say, heather and valencia lost out on extra screen time because the narrative favoured nathaniel, even when it wasn’t actually utilising nathaniel in a satisfying way.

i always find it ironic that they felt like they had to dial back the grebecca slant in the finale because they were favouring greg too much, because in so many ways the show does (both intentionally and unintentionally) favour nathaniel, which definitely speaks to a greater issue in popular media where we’re prone to favouring the straight white asshole nathaniel represents. nathaniel got to be the one singing her song, which is such an important moment for rebecca, and while as a shipper i cherish that, i’m not blind to the mental gymnastics you have to do to accept nathaniel ever agreeing to be in a musical. the dude even got an entire episode from his POV, something no other character gets.

tl;dr i totally get why people that don’t like nathaniel resent his presence in the show so strongly. it just so happened that my monkey brain decided it liked the dumbass anyway, and the aspects about the dynamic that interest me outweigh all the things that piss me off.