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Nathan watching a rehearsal with Patrick (on the left). Or there’s Patrick, who seems like a pretty ordinary guy, helpful to a man he thinks is his scene partner’s grandpa (he, of course, is also an actor) - except for those glib and shockingly anti-Semitic comments.

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He starts to say things that he later characterized to Vice (after the second episode aired) as “douchey,” but complained didn’t show the full picture of his personality. He starts out seeming kind of laid-back and cool and ends looking like someone who needs some help. On the other hand, there’s Robbin, who dates Angela and almost moves into the house. When the teenage version of Angela and Nathan’s “son,” Adam, breaks character and lets himself be an actor named Joshua, he’s startlingly insightful, and his performance is great.

The participants in the Nathan Fielder Acting Method classes that form the backbone of Episode 4 - who, no matter how deep they’re in on the joke, are definitely actors - seem talented, serious, and hard-working. Not every one of the “real” people who come on The Rehearsal is made to look bad. I The Rehearsal is an exploitative reality show And Nathan Fielder is a monster. There are a lot of ways of looking at The Rehearsal. “real”? Are they victims? Are they in on it? What about the crew? The actors? Does turning the mechanics of Nathan’s contrived worlds inside out make them more authentic, or are there more layers to uncover?Īll of this means that what you see in The Rehearsal - which honestly I cannot believe HBO greenlit, it’s so wild - may not be what your friend sees or someone on Twitter sees. Are people like Kor and Angela (the middle-aged Christian woman with whom Nathan “raises” a “child”) and Robbin (the man she dates, who turns out to be kind of a numerologist) and Patrick (whose brother thinks his girlfriend is a “gold digger”).

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Most of us know by now that what we see on TV is crafted reality, not the real thing. In general, savvy 21st-century watchers that we are, we expect everything on TV - from scripted dramas to the screamiest reality show - to be, in a sense, fiction. (TV tends to make us feel connected to characters, not to the people behind the camera.) To put it another way, if it makes you feel weird, that’s the point. The Rehearsal is at least in part designed to activate a connection that’s rarely alive in the largely passive medium of TV: the link between audience and creator. The longer you watch The Rehearsal, though, the less obvious it is what you’re actually watching.Īnd that’s not a bug - it’s a feature. The fake Alligator Lounge on the sound stage. Two of the major story beats in The Rehearsal’s pilot episode rely on the fact that Nathan has also rehearsed his encounters with Kor, building a replica of Kor’s house, practicing their first encounter, and later revealing a secret of his own to Kor - all of which happens with the aid of an actor (K. It is clear almost from the start that what we’re seeing in The Rehearsal is not as straightforward as the comedy of Nathan For You.

This pilot episode generated immediate buzz, for obvious reasons.

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(That bar? Brooklyn’s Alligator Lounge, famous among New Yorkers of my vintage for giving out a free pizza with every beer.) It feels like something straight out of Charlie Kaufman’s existentially trippy Synecdoche, New York. Nathan is ready to help him handle his lie, including building, on a sound stage, a perfect recreation of the bar where Kor’s encounter would occur. In the pilot episode, Nathan helps a man named Kor - a good-natured Brooklyn public school teacher - tell one of his bar trivia teammates that he doesn’t have a master’s degree, though for many years he’s led the team to believe he has. Warning: Details from episodes 1-4 of The Rehearsal are discussed below.

Then he meticulously recreates the conditions under which they will have this interaction, hires an actor to play other people in the “scene,” and rigorously rehearses the encounter, trying to anticipate possible outcomes and prepare the “real” person for the conversation. As the show’s name suggests, it starts out as a kind of social experiment slash therapy innovation: Nathan locates people (on Craigslist, apparently) who need to have difficult conversations or otherwise emotionally fraught scenarios. Nathan For You could be strange and hilarious The Rehearsal is in a whole different stratosphere. The Rehearsal’s finale and the strangeness of empathy, explained

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