Yet often the pretender begins to love truly after all, and often becomes what he has feigned to be. Wherefore, you women, be more compliant to pretenders; one day will the love be true which but now was false.— Ovid, “Ars Amatoria”

When I was working on my first film, “Gates of Heaven,” about two California pet cemeteries, I would often think about love. The love of one person for another. It always seemed a tenuous affair at best. And what if one of the parties is dead? Perhaps even more tenuous. O.K., let me extend this a little bit further. What if one of the parties is a dog? And not just a dog—a dead dog. This is the kind of love that interests me. Love as a kind of abject hopefulness. Can one fall in love with nothing? With the desire to be in love?

“Finding Frances,” the Season 4 finale of the Comedy Central series “Nathan for You,” from the Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder, is my new favorite exploration of love. In the course of the two-hour special episode, which aired last month, Fielder goes to elaborate lengths to help a Bill Gates impersonator named Bill Heath track down Frances, the lost love of his youth. Their endeavor involves a series of zany stunts, from pretending to be the crew of the movie “Mud 2” to staging a fake “fifty-seven-year” high-school reunion. But, like all great romances, the story is mixed with a real sense of tragedy and loss.

Before Fielder became a professional comedian, he graduated from a Canadian business school. In a typical “Nathan for You” episode, he plays (is?) a consultant helping to save failing businesses, except that his fixes always involve excursions into Swiftian absurdity. How can a struggling café get around a Starbucks copyright? Turn it into a parody of Starbucks. How can a hotel owner attract vacationing families? Introduce a soundproof box where children can go while their parents have sex. It could be argued that many of Fielder’s attempts are mean-spirited. It is unclear whether he has really helped or done harm by, say, staging a viral video for a petting zoo that helps promote “Nathan for You” but makes little or no reference to the zoo itself. This has been a “problem” with “Nathan for You,” this feeling of discomfort. Should I be watching this? Does it make me into a less-nice person? What are Nathan’s intentions? Fielder will stop at nothing. No barrier of good taste, no fear of the irrational, no prohibitions against the ridiculous. What makes “Nathan for You” so heretical is that all of his projects are based on misrepresentation and lying; and yet, not accidentally, they capture something of the essence of American business.

The final episode in the fourth season goes two steps further. Is it ridiculous? Yes. Is it disturbing? Yes. And yet Nathan draws himself into the story—actually creates a parallel story, almost like a mirror on the proceedings—and in the process creates his essay on love. As Nathan and Bill’s quest unfolds, and the story about long-lost romance quickly descends into a series of bunko schemes, Bill’s feelings for Frances come into question. His is worse than a case of unrequited love. It’s nothing. The dream evaporates in some acrid vapor. But, almost as suddenly, a new dream is born. Bill, in rehearsing his reunion with Frances, meets a woman. And so does Nathan—a woman, Maci, who also happens to be a hired escort. We all know it’s a TV show. We all know that it entails an element of artifice. But where does the artifice begin and end? When Nathan and Maci kiss in front of the cameras, is it just a queasy stunt? Why is it that viewers are so willing to read the romance as real? Maybe “Nathan for You” is ultimately about our unfettered capacity for credulity—not just the suspension of disbelief but the acceptance of the preposterous.

I find the final scene in this episode—and I don’t think I’m giving anything away—to be utterly remarkable. I guess you could say that it breaks the fourth wall. But I’m not sure that there’s a fourth wall to be broken here. We’re so far into a bizarre, constructed realm that, when the camera pulls back and we see everything as a kind of set, as a TV show which is being filmed, it has a destabilizing effect. We knew it all along. Or didn’t we?

I’m starting to see my own life as an experiment in Nathan Fielder’s weird business curriculum. Years ago, for instance, when I was an out-of-work filmmaker, I got a job as a private investigator. In order to get information in one investigation, I had to pose as a filmmaker. I remember the internal confusion this caused, the internal monologue: “But I am a filmmaker. But I’m also posing as one, because in this context no one can know that I am a filmmaker.” It’s not exactly that I was pretending to be something that I wasn’t. I was pretending to be something that I no longer was but would eventually be again. Still, a kind of uneasiness ensued. Who am I really? To what extent are we all play-acting through our lives?

I was talking to my son, Hamilton, about all this when he told me about the “meta-impostor,” and sent me to Philip K. Dick’s “A Scanner Darkly” for an explanation of the term. In the book, a character named Ernie Luckman tells the protagonist, Bob (a.k.a. Fred) Arctor, about a man claiming to be a “world-famous impostor”:

“He had posed at one time or another, he told the interviewer, as a great surgeon at Johns Hopkins Medical College, a theoretical submolecular high-velocity particle-research physicist on a federal grant at Harvard, as a Finnish novelist who’d won the Nobel Prize in literature, as a deposed president of Argentina married to—” “And he got away with all that?” Arctor asked. “He never got caught?” “The guy never posed as any of those. He never posed as anything but a world-famous impostor.”

This exchange could serve as a description of Fielder’s protagonist in “Finding Frances.” Before the finale, Bill Heath appeared in an earlier episode, called “Souvenir Shop,” in which Fielder organizes an elaborate hoax to bring business to a Los Angeles souvenir shop by hiring celebrity impersonators to appear in the store. His first hire, a Johnny Depp impersonator, doesn’t really look like Johnny Depp, so Fielder hires a second impersonator who looks even less like Johnny Depp, thinking that the presence of the not-so-good Johnny Depp impersonator would make the first one look better. Fielder calls in Bill Heath, a self-advertised Bill Gates impersonator, because the Johnny Depp impersonators’ schedules are too busy for regular employment. But, by the end of “Finding Frances,” we learn that Bill Heath was never really a Bill Gates impersonator at all. He merely impersonated a Bill Gates impersonator in order to get the job on “Nathan for You.” A sad state of affairs, but something that might have made Borges happy.

What’s the difference between a bad impersonator and a meta-impersonator? Or between true love and delusion? What makes something real? That we believe in it? That we can convince others to? These questions all come to a head in Fielder’s season finale. Maybe we are all poseurs pretending to be real people. Or possibly the other way around. The series, and this episode especially, is a perfect imitation of life. I mean, a perfect imitation of an imitation of life. However you want to describe it, it is some of the most interesting “reality”-based work yet made.