Comedian Nathan Fielder “rehearses” situations with people in THE REHEARSAL, one of the most surreal, fascinating shows you’ll ever see. Courtesy of HBO Max.“We don’t always get to choose what happens in life, but we do get to decide if we rehearse for it.”
Think about that quote for a moment. Imagine if we had to confess or make a huge decision in our lives – break up with someone, have a child, admit a serious lie to your family, etc. – and we had the chance to “rehearse” every possible outcome with actors. HBO Max’s latest docuseries, The Rehearsal, a six-part, experimental comedy, reenacts these outcomes for us. This may very well be the strangest, most bizarre TV shows in the history of television. The series has been the talk of the town across the film and TV social media world for a while now, with many movie buffs comparing it to the films of Charlie Kaufman. (Don’t know Charlie Kaufman? Being John Malkovich. Just watch that and you’ll get an idea for how surreal The Rehearsal will be.)
This is one of the most fascinating shows I’ve seen in a while, a work of art that made me question my own surroundings and ponder the ramifications of my everyday actions. I remember walking into work halfway through the show and couldn’t comprehend, for just a moment, if my life was real or rehearsed. These people walking by me in the building, were they actors? Was Nathan Fielder, the lead subject and creator of the series, in the building secretly filming my reactions? Or am I just being paranoid? Well, paranoid or not, The Rehearsal messed with my mind. Fielder has crafted an astounding, experimental series that blends the line between fiction and reality. There is plenty of deadpan, absurdist humor, but also heart, and by the last episode, I even got a little emotional.
Fielder is a Jewish comedian from Vancouver and was even a member of his school’s improv comedy group with another famous Canadian Jew you may have heard of: Mr. Seth Rogen. His previous show, Nathan for You (2013-2017), ran for four seasons on Comedy Central and was also a docu-comedy. (Wikipedia labels it as “cringe comedy,” which I didn’t even know was an official term.) Fielder is fully aware of how awkwardly deadpan he is. He never laughs. His eyes are wide and his brow furrowed. Just the way he delivers his lines is robotic.
“I’ve been told my personality can make people uncomfortable, so I have to work to offset that. Humor is my go-to instinct, but every joke is a gamble,” he explains in episode one.
He may make you uneasy, but Fielder is just plain genius. In The Rehearsal, he speaks with everyday people, listens to any issue or troubling life event they’re encountering, and works through ways they can “rehearse” their situation and experience every possible outcome. It sounds pretty simple, right? Let’s say that at work, you’re scheduled to give a dire presentation to a crowded audience soon. You say your lines in the mirror and practice any questions you may be asked. You prepare yourself for anything good or bad that may arise. We’ve all “rehearsed” situations like these in our lives, but Fielder takes it one HUGE step further. He has a secret warehouse which he uses as a replica for the person to rehearse their situation, with every design meticulously copied. The individual enters the location and is greeted by actors pretending to be everyday people in this situation. In addition, Fielder creates a “decision tree” of the order of conversations the person has. By doing this, the individual gets to rehearse every potential scenario.
“If you plan for every variable, a happy outcome doesn’t have to be left to chance,” he believes.
The premise of the show is essentially an experiment into the “what ifs” in our daily decisions and ways we can naturally react to them. All of it feels oddly therapeutic and impossible to pull off, but Fielder does it with skill and remarkable absurdness.
In episode one, we meet Fielder’s first “client,” a man named Kor. Kor’s main issue he needs to face is that he lied to a close friend of his about attaining a master’s degree. Fielder assembles a team of actors and turns his warehouse into a replica of the bar Kor attends with his friends. Inside, he can practice his confession. Fielder thinks of every possible outcome in this situation. What if Kor arrives and his table is taken? What if the pizza he orders for the table is late? What if when he confesses to his friend, she gets extremely upset? What if when he confesses, she’s actually OK with it?
The experiment works, for the most part, and by the end of episode two, The Rehearsal’s focus takes a bit of a turn. We expect each episode to revolve around a different person, but throughout the series, Fielder focuses on one person in particular, a young woman named Angela. Angela, a very devout Christian, is thinking about having children with a husband. Fielder takes her to a farmhouse in Oregon where she can “rehearse” motherly scenarios with babies. He delivers baby actors for her to practice with, but since babies can’t work past 7:30, he uses robot babies in the evenings. The crew sneaks into the infant’s bedroom window, snatches the baby infant, and replaces it with a robot. Furthermore, Angela’s baby will grow three years every week. This way, she will get to rehearse her life if she becomes a mother.
When the participant who was supposed to play Angela’s husband drops out, Fielder decides to take his place and participate in the rehearsal himself. It’s through his journey that we begin to see a lonelier, more vulnerable side of the comedian throughout the season, as well as an increasingly farcical sense of humor. There is an innate sadness about Fielder, perhaps an actual longing to become a husband a father himself. However, is he truly a lonely guy? Or is he just pretending to be?
I cannot stress enough how much The Rehearsal messed with my mind! In a weird way, you can’t tell what’s real and what’s not in this show. Is Fielder rehearsing us, the audience, this entire time? He co-wrote the show with Carrie Kemper and Eric Notarnicola, but why do the non-simulated conversations onscreen feel scripted? Nothing is what it seems, and each episode of The Rehearsal gets stranger and stranger and stranger.
The humor of the show is all the more surreal. Angela, for example, seems like a serious loony, which is all the more unfortunate because she’s not an actor. Her beliefs are…well, very out there. According to her, Halloween is the highest Satanic holiday of the year, Google is controlled by the Devil himself, and she and Fielder’s child should not be raised Jewish and Christian because Judaism denies that Jesus Christ, the “chief cornerstone,” came and died for us. She also tells her fake husband about her favorite movie, Apocalypto (2006), directed by Mel Gibson…
Fielder’s facial expressions add to the absurdity of the show. There is one particular moment that stuck with for me. It’s near the end of an episode, and the comedian is staring intently at a green pepper sitting atop a kitchen counter. The camera zooms in and Fielder looks weirdly perplexed. He stands up, walks to the counter, turns the pepper on its side, and then the episode ends. What? What?! What does it all mean? We’re not expected to laugh at a moment like this. Fielder is the auteur here, and his intellect, as ambiguous or weird as it is, is very inspiring. I’ll end this post with a powerful statement he makes in one episode.
“It’s easy to assume that others think the worst of you, but when you assume what others think, maybe all you’re doing is turning them into a character that only exists in your mind. The nice thing is sometimes all it takes is a change in perspective to make the world feel brand new.”
The Rehearsal is now streaming on HBO Max.