The Rehearsal - Nathan Fielder - HBO

One of the planning conversations I would have liked to have heard is when they decided to reference this movie.

The Rehearsal pic.twitter.com/bRHmEK5hTP

— 𝔯𝔦𝔠𝔥 (@birthdayrich) August 6, 2022

Incidentally, the paramedics that came to help Adam at the end were two of the actors from his Los Angeles acting class, which means he flew them up for the shoot. Is this the first time we've seen actors from one segment crossover to another segment?

Also, Angela ... even if she's "real" she can't be real, can she? At least no more than any other actor hired to play a role? She is so unflappable and serene in this surreal situation that I can only assume her patience is linked to a paycheck. Has she even left the house yet? How long has she been in the house? Has she (or any of them) actually spent the night in the house, or is it all a fictionalized scenario? Which ... I mean, of course it is, from the cameras to the countdown clock to switching out the kids, every minute of this situation had to have been thought about in advance, which is very thematically on point, which is to say, suspicious. But to what end? Each episode gets more and more twisted up in itself. This most recent one is, of course, the one most about the divide between acting and literal/emotional truth. But in a sense, hasn't every episode been about that? I recently rewatched "Smokers Allowed," and the "I love you" scene ... are we watching the transformation of acting into truth? Or is that just what all good acting is?

Was this ever posted here?

Okay, let me expand on that. So this is what it was like to be on Nathan For You.

— Victoria Lynn (@incertaspecie) September 2, 2019

Loved the entire concept of him being away for his other project for a few days and then working that into the parenthood project by making him a deadbeat dad who hasn’t seen his son in nine years and the resulting “troubled adolescent” life this kid’s now living. This show’s really developed into something brilliant. Impressed by how it folds poignancy into these totally absurd situations.

So many lols at Nathan living as the actor. The clothes, the wig, the seemingly painted on five o’clock shadow. There are a lot of quick shots in this show with funny details in them that can be easy to miss, makes me want to rewatch.

That slide scene alone was one of the single most delightful things I’ve seen on TV in a long time.

I will co-sign that Angela as a type is 100% real and I believe that’s really her. She is acting to a certain extent as she is someone who signed up for a “reality show” and there’s always a level of performance involved. The quirks of some of these people seem entirely too real to be invented whole cloth.

I’m on the side that the details of behind the scene “real v. scripted” stuff aren’t worth getting caught up on. The show is about the merging of the two and I’m sure these things intertwined in varying ways while making it.

I’m on the side that the details of behind the scene “real v. scripted” stuff aren’t worth getting caught up on. The show is about the merging of the two and I’m sure these things intertwined in varying ways while making it.

Heavy otm

as a person who lives about 20 minutes away from where they shot the “homesteading” stuff and just south of portland let me tell you, I meet about four Angelas a week

a woman named Allison came into my work last weekend and wouldn’t stop hugging me and crying about the beauty of my aura. sure she was a little tipsy and I was like “okay” but it also wasn’t out of this world unusual

I can totally see that she's real, but there are always two realities. There's Angela, as she is in real life, and there's Angela, who was cast in this show to be a certain person (who happens to be who she might really be). But just like Adam, he's his son, but Nathan (or "Nathan") tells him his reaction to his return after 9 years is not realistic. So Adam gives a more "realistic" performance ... by doing what Nathan tells him to do, down to a scripted overdose and rescue by EMTs, which is of course ridiculous. The more Nathan works to make something "real" the less real it really is. Which is why I wonder about Angela. She can be both real and playing a character based on who she really is, and Nathan is not above telling people how to behave or what to say. And there are of course specific shots and scenes in the show that had to be pre-planned, which begs the question: what else is pre-planned? Which even asking the question is convoluted, because of course *everything* is pre-planned to an extent! It's a TV show, with cast, crew and writers. That's true of lots of reality shows, but this one seems to be *about* the fiction, the artifice, rather pretending said artifice does not exists, like so-called "reality" shows tend to play it. That it's about the fiction in service and search of some unattainable "truth" just adds another layer. Like acting, which Nathan explicitly addresses in this ep, does playing pretend make the truth achieved any less authentic, and less real? It's fascinating.

It's kind of like what Springsteen calls his "magic trick" #onethread

Naturally it was a pre-planned gag, but the extent to which Angela's child-rearing experiment has been completely hijacked by Nathan to suit his own needs is just the funniest thing. I think he clearly wants her to react to that in some way but she's totally locked into 'if just I go with the flow, I will be a reality star' mode.

Which of course gets back to the is it/how scripted nature of it. To suit Nathan's needs? "Nathan's" needs? The needs of the character? The needs of the show? Is there a pre-devised end in mind? I guess we'll find out. Is Angela not reacting to her prompts because of who she is, or because of who she has been told to be, just as "Adam" reacted "wrong" at first, too, until Nathan redirected him.

Angela so far has played a tiny part of this, tbh. What does she do all day? It looks like she's always working on Tik Tok dances. Also wondering, practically/legally speaking, did she have to be vaccinated for the production? Because she seems like the sort that would not be.

as a person who lives about 20 minutes away from where they shot the “homesteading” stuff and just south of portland let me tell you, I meet about four Angelas a week

― Clay, Sunday, August 7, 2022 1:12 PM (one hour ago)

Yep, good old Clackamas County (Gladstone resident here). I don't recall if Angela is local though or if they flew her in for the show.

I feel like a big meta-moment (in a show full of them) was during the acting workshop when Nathan, playing the actor (Tom?), is given the waiver by the actor-Nathan that he has to sign, and he effectively says, "who reads this shit" and just signs it. It's a commentary about how Nathan gets people to participate on the show.

I liked this piece by Isaac Butler (author of a recent book about the history of method acting): https://slate.com/culture/2022/08/the-rehearsal-episode-4-nathan-fielder-hbo-max.html

That - and showing the cameras, and inhabiting the mindset of an aspiring actor trying to work out WTF was going on but not wanting to fuck up an opportunity- was the strongest part of the ep IMO - kind of reverberated though the rest of those scenes and others…

…and then having those actors playing paramedics at the end was some kind of weirdly moving emotional payoff - and maybe that is one version of what this show does that is great? Show us weird refracted versions of our lives and choices, in a way that amazingly lets us see/feel very familiar situations from a unique new perspective?

Xp, that was

xp thanks jaymc, that was great

The other amazing meta-moment was how the use of Patrick's grandfather backstory to improve his rehearsal was doubled by the attempted use of Angela's drug use backstory though the introduction of Adam's drug use. I assume this didn't really have the same effect on Angela or they wouldn't have had to de-age Adam, but who knows.

One thing I noticed is that the first episode was filmed in 2019 (according to Tricia’s blog) and the other ones were probably filmed a year or two later, judging by the presence of a masked up crew in some scenes. So the trivia episode was the pilot sold to HBO, while what we’re seeing from Episode 2 on was the show Nathan actually wanted to make. This was probably obvious to everyone else but I just realized it now

it def feels to me like 'assembled', similar to how 'how to w/ john wilson' is -filmed pieces stitched together that support a storyline -- like i truly doubt the time nathan spends away in la doing the acting workshop or the time he runs thru the raising cains scenario w/ that dude corresponds linearly to time he's away from the house and angela

also there is nothing funnier to me than reading & re-reading this part of the wiki recap from ep 2

Seeking a simulated husband, Angela dates Robbin, a numerology-obsessed man who wants to have sex with Angela despite her devout Christian beliefs against premarital sex. When Robbin quits the project due to the robot baby's incessant crying, Nathan inserts himself into the experiment as Angela's non-romantic co-parent.

Reading the plot laid out like that evokes a non-fictional Sex House.

“hbo cameras”

lol, "Sex House" was ahead of its time.

Describing most of these episodes to someone makes them seem particularly nightmarish.

most of my friends have opted out of this show with episode three, finding it too uncomfortable and mean. my friends are pussies.

I want the wife to watch this with me so bad but she hates cringe humor but this is so good and so much more than that.

Yeah, as usual I have been unsuccessful in getting anyone I know to care about it. It’s really hard to explain, and I think it all just translates as “oh, it’s Nathan fielder making everyone feel weird again”. Which it is, but so much more

i was watching and my wife walked in and asked "is this a documentary?" and i had no idea how to answer lol

Is this even meant to be a comedy? At this point I really don't think so. That's why I don't buy into the sudden "Nathan is mean" discourse. Sure, "Nathan for You" was more often than not made to be funny, sometimes seemingly at the expense of others (sort of, and with the occasional redemptive dip into existential profundity), but this? There's really not much funny about it, imo. If anything it underscores that life is inherently funny because it's so weird and strange and unexpected, but that's very different from comedy. Unless we're talking about it in the Dantean sense.

Is this even meant to be a comedy?

ymmv but i find all of this deeply, deeply funny, every episode, nearly every minute of it

but i also think, as you mention, that life itself is deeply weird and strange. life itself isn't always funny. but the rehearsal is deeply weird, strange, and also very much funny on purpose. i don't know how else to describe the scene where the crew half-buried a bunch of vegetables clearly bought from the supermarket in the garden, and watching Angela harvest them with not a little bit of satisfaction

Nathan himself also has this fumbling, Chaplinesque quality that makes nearly every scene he's in funny (to me, at least).

good question but yeah, I think it is, I mean inventing this convoluted scenario where you 'speedrun' parenting a child by having him age rapidly and then have him act resentful because Fielder's weeklong vacation to do a different segment for the show means he missed the kid's entire childhood, resulting in him getting into drugs and overdosing is really fucking funny

that said I do think there's obviously something else going on here, maybe not an attempt to be especially profound but at least an attempt to do something that's never really been done before. I got the same feeling with How To With John Wilson, idk how to describe that show either cuz there's nothing else like it. I wonder if people felt that way with Seinfeld when they started doing the "sitcom about nothing" plot. to me Nathan Fielder (along with guys like Tim Heidecker) are a very modern form of comedian in that they play around in that space of what really is acting/performance art/comedy. I think it speaks a lot to my generation which has always lived in this world where pretty much everything you see is staged - not just TV and movies but also advertising, social media, etc. - everything is meant to convey something but none of it is real, exactly.

that's what I appreciated so much about the first episode (and a lot of NFY stuff) - who knows what & how much the real Kor & Tricia were told to do but their interactions felt very real in a way you almost never see in a TV show. By which I mean their minds were always kind of somewhere else, which is how people actually act. Whereas the actors were always very pointed in what they were trying to convey. that said the subsequent episodes, especially this last one, were way more fascinating in my book

like with Tim Heidecker I'm not even referring to stuff like On Cinema, which of course is hilarious and gloriously meta in its own way, but rather like Tim & Eric doing all the infomercial parody stuff. obviously every sketch comedy show does some sort of funny commercial bit, but the premises is usually something like "what if the product was really dumb". whereas Tim & Eric got what was really funny about infomercials - all these people who never acted before in their life trying to express emotions that are wildly inappropriate for the scene & all these bizarre turns of phrase that no human would ever use. it wasn't 'lets make a funny commerical' its 'lets do something funny with all the contrived constraints that TV commercials have to force themselves into'. this show definitely uses that style of humor.

this world where pretty much everything you see is staged - not just TV and movies but also advertising, social media, etc.

and also, that during our lifetimes (i think i'm a few days younger than fielder), a style of "reality" started getting mapped onto all of that. "reality tv", of course, which is very staged, but also advertising and the way that corporations and the "world" writ large has adjusted itself to try to be more "real". i am not equipped to type this post right now, sorry. but hopefully someone knows what i mean

maybe another way of putting it is that the fakeness of tv has a lot in common with the fakeness of reality, more so each day. i'm not sure which direction it's flowing, but the world is infused with artificiality, and not only that, but nodding in the direction of that same fakeness as well and acknowledging it, and carrying on doing more or less the same thing. (on my very negative days i feel this way about social media and what i do on it).

and then having those actors playing paramedics at the end

WAIT what, the EMTs who rescue overdosing teen Adam are the actors from the Fielder Method school???? Missed this entirely.

Is this even meant to be a comedy?

Yes, but in the same sense that, like, Samuel Beckett is comedy (which it is)

I want the wife to watch this with me so bad but she hates cringe humor

Same. But she has some background in acting so I might be able to get her back in with ep 4.

like with Tim Heidecker I'm not even referring to stuff like On Cinema, which of course is hilarious and gloriously meta in its own way, but rather like Tim & Eric doing all the infomercial parody stuff. obviously every sketch comedy show does some sort of funny commercial bit, but the premises is usually something like "what if the product was really dumb". whereas Tim & Eric got what was really funny about infomercials - all these people who never acted before in their life trying to express emotions that are wildly inappropriate for the scene & all these bizarre turns of phrase that no human would ever use. it wasn't 'lets make a funny commerical' its 'lets do something funny with all the contrived constraints that TV commercials have to force themselves into'. this show definitely uses that style of humor.

― frogbs, Monday, 8 August 2022 16:33 (twenty minutes ago) link

As Odenkirk said - T&E had a fresh perspective via parodying the medium itself

"WAIT what, the EMTs who rescue overdosing teen Adam are the actors from the Fielder Method school???? Missed this entirely."

yeah. their faces are only shown briefly but long enough for it to be clear if you're eagle-eyed

Maybe I just pay special attention to faces in general but it felt kind of hard to miss! Because it wasn't just anyone from the class as the paramedic, it was Thomas.

and also, that during our lifetimes (i think i'm a few days younger than fielder), a style of "reality" started getting mapped onto all of that. "reality tv", of course, which is very staged, but also advertising and the way that corporations and the "world" writ large has adjusted itself to try to be more "real". i am not equipped to type this post right now, sorry. but hopefully someone knows what i mean

― Bruce Stingbean (Karl Malone), Monday, August 8, 2022 11:36 AM (forty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

ya I definitely know what you mean, specifically when it comes to advertising. the style of ads I grew up with was people receiving a flame-grilled Whopper and acting like they'd just witnessed the birth of their first child. women taking a swig of Coke and exuding this expression of pure joy and wonder. it was obviously all so fake and easy to make fun of but at least the parameters of the ad were very clear; e.g. in a McDonalds commercial everyone is hungry, McDonalds is the only food there is, and everyone loves it. whereas now commercials really do try to make a quote-unquote "human" connection which all feels very manipulative and fake; best example right now are all those insurance commercials which are maybe funny enough to be B-level SNL skits but are really just about themselves - like this Geico ad in which the gecko, who was introduced years ago as a marketing ploy, is in the office, trying to come up with a new advertising slogan, as if the company is saying "you know we all hate insurance commercials, but we're gonna run 'em anyway, so we're going to appear like we're on your side"...its like all the kids who grew up with insane Ronald McDonald shit started thinking seriously about what kind of advertisement would actually feel "real". and of course the joke is now that everything is so meta and self-referencing these days that nothing's actually real anymore. the Progressive Lady is a thing because they worked from the ground up to make it a thing. and now all their ads are about how everyone loves that thing. which in itself is a commentary on how advertisements are a natural part of our lives now, same as wind and thunder.

I feel like this is maybe Gen X's fault.

I definitely thought the full-grown veggies were funny, though maybe absurd is a better word. But they were also the set-up to Nathan seeing the sticker on the pepper on the counter later, and that wasn't played for laughs, necessarily. The pepper reveal comes when Nathan is monologuing about the limits of control, about how there will always be things you overlook (in the show, in life). Which is of course another meta joke, since his crew put the pepper there and made sure the sticker was facing out so that he would see it, which of course he would, because it was *written and designed to be seen*. So kind of like Adam in the next episode, in pursuit of "reality" Nathan sets up something that's completely planned, which of course simultaneously affirms his theme and subverts his point.

Earlier this summer I came across a description of "The Cherry Orchard" as a comedy, and I briefly went down a rabbit hole: wait, is it a comedy? Am I misremembering it? Doesn't it end pretty terribly for many (all?) involved? And indeed, it turns out there is something to this. Citing Wiki for expediency:

Chekhov originally intended the play as a comedy (indeed, the title page of the work refers to it as such), and in letters noted that it is, in places, almost farcical. When he saw the original Moscow Art Theatre production directed by Konstantin Stanislavski, he was horrified to find that the director had moulded the play into a tragedy. Ever since that time, productions have had to struggle with this dual nature of the play (and of Chekhov's works in general).

The play opened on 17 January 1904, the director's birthday, at the Moscow Art Theatre under the direction of the actor-director Konstantin Stanislavski. During rehearsals, the structure of Act Two was re-written. Famously contrary to Chekhov's wishes, Stanislavski's version was, by and large, a tragedy. Chekhov disliked the Stanislavski production intensely, concluding that Stanislavski had "ruined" his play. In one of many letters on the subject, Chekhov would complain, "Anya, I fear, should not have any sort of tearful tone... Not once does my Anya cry, nowhere do I speak of a tearful tone, in the second act there are tears in their eyes, but the tone is happy, lively. Why did you speak in your telegram about so many tears in my play? Where are they? ... Often you will find the words "through tears," but I am describing only the expression on their faces, not tears..."

I guess reality TV is a much more apt comparison than commercials - I remember a time when these shows at least *tried* to pretend they were real but they certainly don't anymore. When someone points out the fakeness of reality TV it feels like all those who got their kicks by telling people that professional wrestling wasn't real. If you actually watch WWE Raw you can tell pretty damn quickly that they aren't pretending otherwise. And reality TV itself right now is very much in the same boat, if you watch The Bachelorette they don't really make a secret out of how contrived and silly everything is. But at the end of the day these people really do get married, same as how pro wrestlers really are getting hit with chairs and Real Housewives actually are going to jail for tax fraud. And there's a whole generation of YouTubers and Tiktokers living the same way, their whole lives revolve around making well-rehearsed 'content' but it's not fake, exactly, because that's who they are. They're content creators.

The most apt example of this of course is Donald Trump, arguably the worst businessman America ever produced, who nevertheless was so good at getting his name out there that he was actually able to become a success via a reality TV show in which he **played** a successful businessman, which as we know now he very much wasn't. He then used that platform to position himself into the Republican nominee for President, despite the fact that he was a lifelong Democrat, whose entire platform was whatever drew him the most applause and media engagement. Which led to shit like "build the wall" becoming an actual, expensive policy position, instead of the idiotic joke that it originally was. In the last episode of NFY there's a bit where Nathan says he "can't see" Trump ever becoming President because he doesn't think anyone would take him seriously, but the Bill Gates impersonator - a guy who was willing to do and say whatever he had to in order to be on TV - thinks Trump is a sure thing. And he turns out to be right! That's what 'reality' is right now! And it sucks big time!

(see also: the Alex Jones case)

I think you can argue that the "reality" in reality television really exists in the moments where the premise breaks down or the cast acknowledges the existence of the fourth wall. I don't think The Rehearsal is unique in this, but it's a reality show about creating a reality show, and Nathan doesn't break the fourth wall in his "rehearsals" as much as he just walks in and out through it.

Going full inception and becoming one of his actors studio characters just makes it into a series of boxes within boxes

A lot like a bar or chicken restaurant inside a warehouse, really

I think it goes one step further, because it's not just a reality show about creating a reality show, it's about creating a reality that is better - or perhaps more "real" - that the real reality!

(than)

I really liked that they seemed to flirt with the possibility that Nathan would be in so deep that he would forget who he was when he was inhabiting Thomas. It seemed like they might be going there at least.