Nathan Fielder is a bard of discomfort. In his absurdist Comedy Central docuseries Nathan For You, the Canadian comedian offered his services as a small business consultant to unsuspecting real people, whom he persuaded, with a straight face, to do things such as sell excrement-flavored frozen yogurt, create a “sleeper cell” of bad drivers to undermine Uber, and reimagine a local bar as a smoking-themed community theater to exploit a loophole in California’s laws against indoor smoking. If the metafictional screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) was asked to reboot The Office as a reality TV series, with roles filled by actual residents of Scranton, the result might look something like Fielder’s work.

In his even more absurd, at times surreal, follow-up series, HBO’s The Rehearsal, Fielder presented himself as the impresario of an audacious experiment: What if we could free ourselves of risk, uncertainty, and regret, he proposed, by meticulously rehearsing and war-gaming life itself? With the help of hired actors, background extras, a robotic baby, and, at one point, an exact life-sized replica of a real bar in Brooklyn, Fielder pursued that premise to its bizarre, Truman Show-style conclusion. As with Nathan For You, part of The Rehearsal’s squirm-inducing comedy came from the fact that not everyone on screen was in on the joke.