The Rehearsal
Nathan Fielder is a bit of a controversial, off-the-cuff character. You may know him from his show Nathan For You on Comedy Central, but he’s not quite a John Mulaney, a Trey Parker/Matt Stone, or a Sacha Baron Cohen. He’s managed to stay relatively underground for quite some time, acting mostly as a writer or a producer on several projects (the latest being How To with John Wilson, which you may have seen trending that one time on HBO Max). This time, with The Rehearsal, he is certainly climbing his way into popular culture at a faster pace than ever before.
I’m not sure if the premise of The Rehearsal is as interesting for you as it is for me: someone who studied “the craft” for nearly a decade. Many critics have claimed it’s a brilliant look inside a neurodivergent mind, but to me, it simply seems like a look inside a human mind (but this could also just be me genuinely being on the spectrum). The Rehearsal shows ordinary people rehearsing for extraordinary events. But they are small extraordinaries: Kor has been lying for years about having a Master’s degree, and he’s finally coming clean to his best friend; Angela, in her mid-forties, is considering having a child; Patrick wants to confront his brother regarding their grandfather’s will, and their shared inheritance. These are seemingly every-day events with enormous, personal stakes. To me, it’s a no-brainer that these situations very much demand a full rehearsal. And Fielder, in his way, offers one to each of them. In fact, he offers several… he’s really known for his… erm? Generosity?
I think that his generosity spurs from his never-ending curiosity. Often, Fielder will move the action of these episodes along with an important inquiry that either changes the circumstances of the rehearsal, changes the overall trajectory, or simply intervenes to make the impending event “work.” This is much like how a writer or director might work on a play in a genuine rehearsal room, except this is real life. And Nathan Fielder refuses to compromise his own brand of hyperrealism. In the very first episode, for instance, he meets Kor. Only after getting to know him and what he is looking for out of this rehearsal does Nathan admit that he has rehearsed this conversation “hundreds of times” before. He has an exact replica of Kor’s house, in which he has been rehearsing with a “look-alike” Kor (an actor he has hired to play him) for this very moment.
In every situation, he tries to maintain the highest level of reality possible, but he always fails because, at the end of the day, the rehearsal isn’t real. It’s simply preparing for the “real.” This is perhaps why I so admire and am intrigued by this experiment. It is probably the closest anyone has ever come to realist purity, and yet, total mimesis still hasn’t been achieved.
Though HBO has renewed it for a second season already. Maybe this one will do the trick.
