The Rehearsal - Nathan Fielder - HBO

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.

i feel like i am enjoying this show wrong. years of watching wrestling has forced me to learn how to shut off the "is this a work or a shoot" part of my brain because it takes away from that. but it seems like based on the convos here that really trying to separate work from shoot is the fun of it. i was doing that a bit in the first ep but by the second, i just fully decided to accept it all as "what's on the tv" and it's making it a more passive experience. i might just have to watch everything that aired so far again and look for the cracks in the facade.

It's also a kind of absurd autofiction, like a funhouse Knausgaard or How Should a Person Be?

Schrodinger's Reality Show - You don't know it's real or not until you watch it (and maybe not even then).

well sure, that's the subtext of all these actors he's hiring to play specific people - they speak clearly, their conversations are focused, they tell you straight up what they're feeling - real people don't really act like that

which is why I loved the teen actor going "look who decided to show up" - there's no way an actual teenager would say that in that situation. but its exactly what an actor would come up with

Speaking for myself I'm just along for the ride. I'm not distracted about whether Angela or Thomas etc are 100% unscripted or not. It's just a hilarious never ending unfolding paper fortune teller sequence.

feels very Synechdoche New York to me

I thought Thomas Nathan had kind of a Wham era George Michael vibe

the other bit about reality television is nearly everyone who is on it at this point has watched reality tv before

there was an anecdote I'd read about one of the cast from the very first season of The Real World questioning someone from a later season about how real events were. to them, certain interactions were authentic on their own season because they'd happened organically (or at least as organic as anything can be on reality tv). but when a similar situation happened in a later season, they wondered if people were doing a bit based on what they'd seen before

which is funny because a lot of human interactions are definitely not unique and our lives have a lot of repetition. or maybe we're just living out minor variations of the same existence. who knows?

xp it's the hair and makeup, for sure

Yeah reality shows always have predictable beats to the way conversations / arguments play out. At a certain point, the people on the shows (""actors"") start to just play the part and the editors don't have to work quite as hard- oop wait never mind all reality shows are 100% scripted

The ancestor of a lot of reality shows, The Real World, notoriously messed with their own formula to change it from a bunch of people living in the same place to a bunch of people living and working together on a shared task in order to keep everything focused on the group.

I never watched the show until much later having not had MTV, but by the third season at latest there were people "doing reality show stuff" off the bat. The newer shows that have the same cast for multiple seasons are basically nightmares, because there's no way the people on them have not watched episodes of their own show between seasons, right? I'm blissfully unaware here, but have there been scenes on any of them where the people watch their own show?

Watching and reacting to their own shows was very much a thing on Terrace House

Still lolling at "you're a fucking disaster, my guy"

feels very Synechdoche New York to me

yes, feels very like a Kaufmann script but instead of a movie it's reality tv

If this starts at the pilot and goes onto the end of the series getting progressively strange is there further to go for a series 2.
Will people already be aware of it in sufficient numbers to make it more difficult to do, or is its stagedness already rendering that moot.

Interesting comments on the spectacle anyway. & interesting question of time. Like most people live in real time and try to balance out several threads running through their lives don't they? So the amount of time one would commit to spending the time this is suggesting to addressing one part of one's narrative seems to be difficult at least. Like is it suggested that everything else is put on a backburner while this is happening. I do remember a comment about hoping Angela didn't see the move to Oregon as a holiday.

THought the 2ary story in episode 3 was interesting the guy who is roped into helping out an actor playing a fictional grandfather who says he is going to leave some part of a treasure he has helped find. Hope he wasn't banking on that income, I was in the other part of teh room listening to that when the individual disappeared from the rehearsal . Did seem pretty callous and manipulative to have this set up for an emotional reaction Nathan was looking for.
Is this whole series just a set up to talk about ethics involved? & how fictional is Nathan Fielder himself

In addition to Synechdoche NY, watching the latest episode in particular I also found myself thinking of Primer, a movie about people playing doubles of themselves, and doubles of those doubles visiting the same spaces over & over again like lost ghosts, obsessed with recreating the moments in their lives over & over in order to "fix" them, only to find that those recreations are being manipulated by endless layers of doubles who are themselves recreating the lives of other doubles.

Of course the guy who made Primer turned out to be an actual dangerous manipulative psychopath, like the scary non-comedy version of what would happen if the Nathan For You character existed in real life.

"i love the movie Apocalypto"

I really don't know what to do with this

(not a spoiler)
My favorite exchange:
Angela: "And 100 million stood to attend him. His clothing was white as snow. His hair was like the whitest wool."
Nathan: "Whoa."
Angela: "Yeah."