The Guardian Weekly

Nathan Fielder’s new show is life as a rehearsal

Comedian Nathan Fielder’s experiment in reality TV is a high stakes game that exposes the building blocks of the genre while creating its own elaborate fictions

By Adrian Horton

One of the many confounding pleasures of The Rehearsal, comedian Nathan Fielder’s elaborate social experiment/ docu-reality HBO series, is how often the show exposes its own illusions. The central concept of the series is straightforward, if typically absurd: what if you could rehearse fraught conversations or situations in advance? How much could you control if you had every resource to prepare? The show depicts both the tedious constructions of facsimile – building a replica bar, hiring actors, stress-testing potential conversations – and the unnerving, at times sublime, suspension of disbelief.

In his prior show, Comedy Central’s cult hit Nathan For You, Fielder drew laughs as the ultimate committer to harebrained ideas carried far past the point of sense, with such deadpan absurdity that you couldn’t distinguish between silly and serious. During four seasons of Nathan For You, Fielder coached real small business owners into inane plans. The show offered a litmus test for one’s tolerance for cringe. The viewing experience was a mix of awe at the grandiose stupidity of the schemes, amusement at the lengths to which Fielder would go, and concern for the businesses.

The Rehearsal takes Fielder’s commitment and viewer trepidation to new heights. It takes a knowingly false notion – that one can control emotions, or life – and doubles down again and again until that notion looks like unhinged genius. There are the building blocks of realityish TV – participants are both exposed and kept at a remove, the assumption that everything is quasi-real and quasi-scripted crisp editing. Watching it feels like reaching the outer fringes of reality television; you’re not quite sure what to make of it, but can’t stop looking.

In the first episode, Fielder helps a trivia enthusiast practice revealing a years-long fib to a friend with photorealistic accuracy, which includes a full-scale working replica of Brooklyn’s Alligator Lounge. The second episode ups the stakes: Fielder unveils a two-month simulation for Angela – a fortysomething born-again Christian who put off having children – to test-run motherhood. We see the Truman Show-esque intricacy of Fielder’s set design – following Angela’s wishes, she lives at a farmhouse in Oregon with a garden, and rehearses the adoption of “Adam” from a real agency, handed over by his real mother.

We also see the arcane scaffolding required to sustain this disbelief. Fielder, blurring the line between the TV producer persona and Nathan For You’s socially awkward, stone-faced disposition, edits the adoption scene in real time, asking the real mother to elaborate on why she’d be “unfit” to be a parent. Big Brother-style cameras film Angela and a cast of child actors (all playing the role of Adam) in the house, beamed to a control board in the production’s nearby headquarters. A giant timer on the living room wall counts down the fourhour shifts for the underage actors, as required by law. Staff members stealthily switch out car seats when Angela’s not looking, or crawl through a window to slip a motorised crying doll into the crib for the night shift. (It is uncomfortable to see toddlers participate in a production they cannot understand, pretending Angela is their mother.)

For viewers, there is little distinction between onstage and offstage, yet it’s fascinating how quickly you take The Rehearsal’s bizarre terms as a given. If, as Megan Garber argued in the Atlantic, the paranoid style of American reality television post-Survivor taught us to assume the awesome, all-knowing power of off-screen producers, The Rehearsal just levels up the visibility of the machinations. The producer’s contortions are plot. When Fielder, who joins Angela’s simulation as platonic co-parent, feels trapped by the rules he has set for his own project, he changes them.

The Rehearsal’s second episode, in which Fielder outlines his plan for Angela, has renewed a critique of Fielder’s work as manipulative or mean. Angela’s devout faith comes off as kooky, her participation in this project delusional; a potential simulation partner for her has since said he takes issue with his portrayal on the show, in which he smokes weed, drives, and

fixates on spiritual numbers. But to dismiss the episode as manipulation feels like a misread of The Rehearsal, which consistently pokes at its own pretensions and sets up Fielder’s unfettered social anxiety as the butt of the joke. Of course it’s manipulation – the discomfort with a person’s portrayal, its perceived fairness or unfairness, is a core tenet of making television about real people appearing more or less as themselves.

All reality shows contain some dance between choreography and watchable chaos, between controlled variables and the power of editing. No one, not even the camp creations of Selling Sunset, or the contestants on Survivor, or the castaways on Love Island, has control over their edit. We are all performing all the time, with no final say on one’s perception; reality participants do so at a heightened degree, with a semi-public record.

The ultimate TV victim, to the extent that there is one, of this concept is Fielder himself. He grows trapped by the confines and gaps of his own experiment, which keeps dodging his grasp, especially as he becomes faux co-parent juggling work and life – in other words, childcare in the show and making the show. Angela has her own visions for the project and acts accordingly.

A separate participant ghosts the production without explanation, though you can infer it’s related to emotions over a deception that does, in my opinion, bump up against an ethical line. In the later episodes, Fielder’s attempts to control variables of perception spiral into an addictively meta, solipsistic Russian doll of impersonations.

At its core, The Rehearsal is deeply curious about how we behave irrationally, the lengths we’ll go to avoid vulnerability. To truly see people, their neuroses and inconsistencies and vanities, is messy. To know it’s being filmed is discomfiting. To have that edited, and shot through with an HBO budget? That’s good television, a reality show in which extreme contrivances get to something real.

The Rehearsal is on HBO in the US and Binge in Australia, with a UK date to be announced

Culture

en-gb

2022-08-12T07:00:00.0000000Z

2022-08-12T07:00:00.0000000Z

https://theguardianweekly.pressreader.com/article/282458532730946

Guardian/Observer