What if you could ease the anxieties of life by meticulously planning every outcome? What if, in the words of the Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder, a “happy outcome doesn’t have to be left to chance?” In The Rehearsal, a dazzlingly strange new docu-comedy series on HBO, Fielder’s efforts to streamline life invariably lead to uncomfortable complications.
On his previous show, the cult Comedy Central series Nathan For You, a deadpan, slightly pushy Fielder positioned himself as a business consultant, persuading unsuspecting small-business owners to adopt his spectacularly bad marketing ideas. His (real) subjects were usually dubious, making the show less a Borat-style stunt to expose stupidity or bigotry than a psychological experiment about the strange things people will agree to because they’re too polite to say no.
Nathan For You pushed discomfort to extremes. A typical episode found Fielder advising a frozen yogurt shop to sell excrement-flavored yogurt or a clothing store to allow customers to shoplift if they’re sufficiently attractive or persuading an Asian American salon owner to affect an Asian accent for customers. In one memorable scene, Fielder, a deranged maestro not above participating in his own stunts, did a Houdini-style timed test of his ability to escape from handcuffs. If he failed, a robotic claw would tear his trousers off, exposing him before an audience of schoolchildren, with a police officer standing by to arrest him for indecency. (He got the cuffs off in time, though not before the claw began working on his fly.)
The Rehearsal, a sequel series of sorts, makes Nathan For You look almost mundane. Now armed with the considerable firepower of an HBO budget, Fielder enters the territory of the outright surreal.
In the first episode, he finds a man on Craigslist, Kor, who needs help navigating a social dilemma. Kor previously lied to a friend about having a master’s degree and wants to come clean to her. After revealing that he meticulously rehearsed his meeting with Kor, Fielder offers to help him rehearse his confession. Without giving too much away, he builds an entire, life-sized replica of the bar where Kor is meeting his friend, populated by actors pretending to be bartenders and customers.
The second episode concerns a woman, Angela, who wants to start a family but hasn’t had a baby or met the right man. She tells Fielder that she likes the idea of living off the land, so he moves her into an idyllic house in rural Oregon, where a series of child actors, as well as a robot baby, are used to practice child-rearing. Angela has some wacky beliefs — she thinks Google is controlled by Satan — and the oddness of the situation is exacerbated by Fielder’s attempts to accommodate his subject’s whims and eccentricities while also fretting over verisimilitude. (There’s not enough time to grow plants, so Fielder and his assistants bury store-bought vegetables in the garden for Angela to harvest.)
As the series progresses, its Truman Show-style meta-aspect is taken to increasingly surreal lengths. While managing his subjects’ rehearsals, Fielder recruits some aspiring actors in Los Angeles to help him, in effect, rehearse his rehearsals. Unsatisfied with the results, he decides to put himself in the shoes of one of the actors, adopting his clothes and moving into his apartment while an actor takes his place as Nathan Fielder. There are, it seems, turtles all the way down.
The Rehearsal is inspired, compelling television and seems to be justly finding its audience, with members of the Fielder cult identifiable to each other by cryptic phrases (“Door city over here”) and shorthand references (“Numbers Guy”). The show has also sparked a debate about whether Fielder’s style of comedy, which is dependent on the participation of real people who are not in on the joke, is mean-spirited or exploitative.
That is difficult to answer without knowing more about the mechanics of the show. Are the participants paid for their time? How much do they know going in? How enthusiastically do they put themselves forward? It also seems important to remember that, as with reality TV or documentaries or vox-pop interviews on television news, no one is forced to participate. The role-play of real children as Angela’s pretend son is slightly unsettling, yet, as Adrian Horton writes in the Guardian, it is “indistinguishable from the work of a child actor on any other show, nor arguably as fraught as, say, a child’s Instagram account created by adults.”
The docu-comedy genre seems to be flourishing in recent years. In HBO’s How To with John Wilson, Wilson molds slice-of-life footage of the public into dryly funny video essays. (Fielder is an executive producer on the show.) Andrew Callaghan’s YouTube video series Channel 5, which grew out of an earlier series interviewing drunken revelers in the streets of New Orleans, explores various subcultures and scenes with a wry eye. And these projects probably owe some debt to the dean of mild-mannered gonzo, the British documentarian Louis Theroux, who is known for embedding with groups such as the Westboro Baptist Church. In his 2015 film My Scientology Movie, Theroux used actors to reenact scenarios described by ex-Scientologists — a Fieldian tactic to get around the sect’s refusal to cooperate.
It’s been said that discomfort is an important element of comedy. Laughter, after all, is often a way of relieving tension. The Rehearsal, however, presents itself as earnest, even poignant. Fielder, as narrator, is depicted as being interested in, and sometimes flustered by, the ethical and philosophical dilemmas that his pageants create. To what extent is this sincere or just another layer of irony — a subtly winking commentary on the artifice of documentary filmmaking? I’m not totally sure. But I’m happily along for the ride.
J. Oliver Conroy’s writing has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
