Slow but clear slippage into his simulations is what makes “The Rehearsal” great
By Andrew Batista
“The Rehearsal,” a streaming series currently on Max, follows comedian Nathan Fielder as he hosts a reality/docu-comedy show about demystifying everyday events. Season two, premiering on April 20, is highly anticipated after the enigmatic first season in 2022. Nathan doesn’t use a script and brings in real participants, all while playing an exaggerated version of himself. A large majority of the events actually happened, though the narrative may shift in post-production.
Nathan helps people prepare for key moments in their lives by creating a simulation of the event the participant wants to rehearse. Through an accurate set, actors, and other helpful resources, the participant will be fully prepared for whatever moment they are practicing for.
For example, in the pilot episode, “Orange Juice, No Pulp,” Nathan helps Brooklyn resident Kor Skeete as he prepares to reveal to his trivia-buddy, Tricia, that he has been lying about his education level for years. To do so, Nathan creates an elaborate set that is indistinguishable from reality in pure appearance of the location Kor wants to come clean—his local bar during trivia night—filled with actors who are tasked with creating the most realistic experience possible.
The show is coming off of Nathan’s successful Comedy Central show, “Nathan for You,” in which he helped small businesses. In a lot of ways, “The Rehearsal” is the sibling of “Nathan for You,” especially the series finale, “Finding Frances,” in which Nathan employs a similar rehearsal practice, albeit on a much smaller scale. In “Nathan for You,” there was some blurring of reality, especially in the aforementioned series finale, but in “The Rehearsal,” as the series progresses, the walls between what is real and not real take the spotlight.
The show masterfully evolves throughout the season while maintaining the signature style of Fielder’s dry comedy and introduces philosophical questions of whether simulations can truly be immersive and lead to a hyperrealistic experience—one that is indistinguishable from real life—for those taking part in them. After episode one, most viewers feel it will be a straightforward show where a participant has a problem in their life and Nathan helps them practice for it. Quickly, however, the show devolves into Nathan himself living in his own fabricated simulation. The show does a superb job of blurring the line between reality and fiction. A lot of times, I found myself asking, “Is this real?” while watching the show.
An episode like “The Fielder Method” is a perfect portrayal of this. This episode follows Nathan going to Los Angeles to look for actors to participate in his experiments. To teach his students how to act in this way, he creates a technique called the Fielder Method, which calls for the actors to essentially stalk the people they will be portraying to learn as much as possible from them. This episode, however, finds Nathan encountering a student in his class who feels uneasy about the morality of the Fielder Method. This shocks Nathan and leads to him going through his classes, with actors playing the other students and himself. Nathan tries to become the student who was uneasy to understand what caused them to feel this way. This means he uses the Fielder Method on his student, eventually taking the keys to the student’s apartment and staying there in the name of better understanding his character.
This slow but clear slippage into his simulations is what makes “The Rehearsal” great. Yes, there is what we expect from Nathan’s shows—some cringey and humorous moments—but here, the comedy of the series almost purely comes from the absurdity of the situations.
The actual laugh-out-loud moments are few and far between, and the unsettling yet intriguing concept takes center stage, especially later in the series when Nathan is nearly fully immersed in his simulation until the wake-up call that serves as the climax of the series occurs—when a child actor in the simulations begins to think of Nathan as his real father. Nathan, of course, responds to this wake-up call by slipping deeper into his simulations, and the ending of the show is equal parts disturbing, fascinating, and brilliant.