In the spirit of today’s show, this post is coming to you unfiltered with no edits. Not even typos. We’ll see how it goes. It’s an experiment. Will it turn out fine or will it be a disaster? -ous mess without the backspace key. (typos hurt me more than they hurt you, trust me, but come along for the ride because you’re here anyway and you don’t want to miss hearing about this masterpiece)
The Rehearsal (2022- )
If you’re not familiar with Nathan Fielder, you should be. Watching The Rehearsal is watching the culmination of his years and years of work on meta humor, that became the central theme of The Rehearsal. But it’s also not a comedy show. It’s a reality show. Don’t think of it as Impractical Jokers, which is a comedy reality show. The Rehearsal doesn’t set out to be explicitly comedy, the comedy comes naturally, as a part of the situations and because it’s Nathan Fielder.
So who is Nathan Fielder? He’d technically be called a comedian but his comedy comes from his persona. This is a persona he’s been cultivating since Nathan For You - another reality' “comedy” show where it’s more direct what he’s doing. He’s helpng out businesses with wacky schemes. This includes classics like turning a coffee shop into Dumb Starbucks (dumb to turn it into a parody to get around the copyright law), promoting a realtor’s business by turning her into a ghost realtor who show s haunted houses, starting a fake fitness craze to lower the labour costs of a moving company, or the time that he risked becoming a sex offender if he couldn’t pull off an escape act as a response to his critics (? no other businesses were involved in this one, I have no explanation for this). All throughout the show, his persona remains consistent - an awkward guy who has crazy ideas and an intense commitment to whatever he’s doing. Even his publicity appearances during the time are in character, including the time he brought Susan Sarandon as a back-up guest on Conan because he thought he was a bad talk show guest on his own. I would even say that he’s never been seen out of character since he got famous.
This brings us to 2022, when The Rehearsal comes out. Fielder has graduated from Comedy Central where Nathan For You aired to HBO and with it comes HBO’s production money that lets him take his style of “comedy” mixed with realtiy to the next level. In The Rehearsal, he gets real people to perform elaborate rehearsals for something they’re hesistant to do in real life, such as confessing to a friend that they’ve been keeping a secret for all the time they’ve known them. But it wouldn’t be a Fielder show if he didn’t try this out beforehand, so he performs ‘The Rehearsal’ himself before even meeting the real participant of the show, having extensively rehearsed how their first meeting at the participant’s house would go, in a full-scale replica of the participant’s house, with an actor playing the participant, going through all the possibilities of how their interaction would go.
They didn’t get it exactly right, but it was their first go and the replica Alligator Lounge they build for the participant to confess to his friend is the closest replica they can possibly make, right down to the exact same chairs (Nathan learned the importance of getting the chair right when his own rehearsal doesn’t go as planned).
What sets the show apart is that it evolves as it goes. Sure, it starts off as an episodic show, each episode, you’ll get a new participant wanting to try a new rehearsal. But it doesn’t stay that way. Like an experiment, every participant changes how The Rehearsal works for the next participant (and it is an experiment, unlike another popular reality show currently running that markets itself as an experiment but has no variables, no tests, no outcomes that changes how it works and how it works is like any other reality dating show with producers and editors forming just as much of the narrative as the participants). As a viewer, you get to see how the rehearsals work, Nathan’s interactions with the participants, with the actors playing roles in the rehearsals. I’m under no illusions that everything in this is ‘unproduced’, everything you do get to see has no doubt been put together the way it is by Nathan Fielder because he wants you to see that. But it’s also blurring the lines between where the show begins and the reality of what happens.
For the first time, we get to see the repercussions of Nathan’s plans. Not all rehearsals are successful. Nathan doesn’t leave when the rehearsal ends, he has to face what happens in real life, and we get to see it.
And that’s the beauty of The Rehearsal. Sometimes it’ll make you laugh, sometimes it’ll make you question Nathan’s sanity, sometimes it’ll make you commend the lengths they go to make this show, and it might even make you tear up - from crying and not from laughter. It’s a thought-provoking show from an overthinking comedian, and it’s completely, unflinchingly original.
That’s all I’m going to tell you about the show without the spoilers, you should discover for yourself what happens. It’s also been renewed for a second season and I’m not even going to attempt to think what Nathan might bring us.
Then go watch the show. It’s only six episodes. And then the mch longer Nathan For You, to see his origins if you haven’t seen it already, or to rewatch it in a new context now that you’ve seen what goes on behind the scenes (sort of) in The Rehearsal.
-end of the expriment-
Well, fuck.
P.S. Hopefully you find this in your email inbox and not spam where differently formatted subject lines sometimes end up because email providers hate this one weird trick.
P.P.S. The Interview with the Vampire ended last week and it was phenomenal. Luckily, a new season of The White Lotus has started to replace my weekly drama show. Also highly recommended. In the new-shows-that-I-don’t-recommend section, we have the Netflix flop Blockbuster (ironic), which is a sitcom that isn’t very funny which is a shame. Mythic Quest is also back with a new season, also airing weekly.
Until next time,
V