A masterclass in absurdity, The Rehearsal is Nathan For You on BALCO steroids, spoilers ahead
There’s no denying the ubiquity of reality television at this point in time. Every conceivable industry or sphere of work has an accompanying documentary crew and dedicated fanbase committed to turning regular people into celebrities. As someone who enjoys reality television fairly regularly despite its inherent flaws, it’s hard not to ignore how formulaic the genre has become, especially with the advent of streaming platforms. With a blank cheque from HBO in hand, Nathan Fielder, who graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades, has created a show that displays a level of creativity that is uncharacteristic of the genre. The Rehearsal is Nathan For You, injected with the same performance enhancers that Barry Bonds had in 2001. Its willingness to push the envelope with its humour, while injecting compelling reflections on parenting in an interfaith household and substance abuse, easily enables it to stand out in a crowded reality TV landscape.
As someone who routinely struggles with confrontation , I find the premise of The Rehearsal particularly ingenious. Rather than leaving stressful social interactions up to chance, why not meticulously rehearse them with the assistance of a man who once proposed to a small business that the best way to attract business was to allow hot people to shoplift? Each participant comes onto the show with a confession they’d like to make, a dispute they’d like to resolve, or a life experience they’d like to simulate. For each scenario, Fielder puts painstaking effort into making the rehearsals as realistic as possible. He scripts conversations using flowcharts to anticipate every conceivable twist, hires doppelganger actors that participants can rehearse their confrontations with, and builds ornate sets that replicate the environments to make the rehearsals as seamless as possible.
The Truman Show-ification of ordinary people’s lives generates predictably ridiculous outcomes at first. In the first episode, we’re introduced to Kor, a teacher, who seeks to confess to a member of his trivia team named Tricia that he lied about having a master’s degree. In response to Kor’s wishes, Nathan engages in patterns of behaviour consistent with a serial killer. He hires an actor to play a fake version of Tricia (I will be the chair of the Fake Tricia for an Oscar committee by the way), and sends her on a reconnaissance mission to understand the real Tricia’s mannerisms under the guise of a shared affinity for bird watching. To ensure that Kor feels comfortable enough to carry out his confession, Nathan builds a detailed replica of Nate’s Lizard Lounge, the trivia bar that Kor frequents, and methodically plants answers to the night’s trivia questions. The confession works, and the episode ends with a strengthened relationship between Kor and Tricia, all thanks to Fielder’s prying hands.
Once Fielder recruits Angela, an unnervingly devout, born-again Christian, to participate in a simulation of raising a child to adulthood, The Rehearsal’s original premise falls through the cracks, and Nathan’s control over the rehearsal itself becomes the focal point of the show. To carry out this rehearsal, Fielder uses his comical HBO budget to build a model home (replete with a fake, crew-supplied, vegetable garden), and procures an array of child actors and a robot baby. He even procures a potential mate for Angela, who, despite his numerous character quirks (“I was telling him the truth, and his demon doesn’t like the truth”?), shares the same bizarre zeal for Christianity as Angela. Once their relationship dissolves, Fielder inserts himself into the experiment as the father (and occasionally mother, spoiler alert!) of Angela’s “child.” This causes the show to descend into much more chaos than one could have reasonably foreseen, primarily because of Fielder’s continued attempts to manipulate and control everything around him.
As a show that routinely plays with the boundaries of morality and basic human ethics, it’s unsurprising that The Rehearsal has engendered a great deal of controversy, especially concerning its treatment of children. Children have routinely been used as potential victims of Fielder’s misgivings (see the “sound deprivation box” and “the claw of shame” episodes of Nathan For You). However, The Rehearsal’s concluding plotline involving a child named Remy served as a bridge too far—even for Fielder. Remy is a six-year-old child actor Fielder hires for Angela’s motherhood experiment/spiritual journey. He instantly forms a strong connection with Fielder, even convincing him to “eat” his faeces in a skit they had recorded for the show. However, once Remy’s turn in the experiment ends, he has a temper tantrum, refusing to leave the show and repeatedly calling Fielder his “daddy.” Remy’s mother reveals that the child’s father is not in the picture and that it is possible that pretending to be Fielder’s child has caused irreparable harm to Remy’s understanding of reality.
The moral outcry about this plotline and the show’s conclusion rings hollow to me. Children instinctively form bonds between those in their lives easily; just as easily as those bonds are formed, they can sever. It’s hard to believe that Nathan’s brief presence and subsequent removal from Remy’s life, despite the show’s narrative about Remy actively seeking a father figure, would amount to long-lasting trauma. If anything, the show’s use of child actors, from sneaking children in and out of the replica home to ensure compliance with Oregon child labour law, to the scene where Fielder attempts to counteract all the teachings of Judaism that a Christian child actor had discovered during filming, seem to be pointed critiques about the child actor industry, and open-ended questions about why a parent would subject their children to such a line of work.
Beyond its use of child actors, The Rehearsal contains a multitude of ethical concerns. Nearly all the participants do not seem to know who Nathan Fielder is, understand what kind of show they’ve signed up for, or possess the self-awareness necessary to control how they come across on screen. When confronted with Fielder’s near-routine violations of their boundaries, the participants do not seem to understand the extent of the incursions (see Kor’s non-reaction when Fielder explains how he managed to get into his home via an elaborate ruse). These participant traits are indictments of the reality television genre as a whole, rather than Fielder himself. I can think of numerous shows that go further with these vulnerabilities than The Rehearsal ever does. Quandaries aside, there’s no denying that The Rehearsal is an innovative and boundary-pushing beacon of hope within an ever-saturated television landscape, and I look forward to seeing what Season 2 has in store.