The Rehearsal premieres June 15 at 11:00 p.m. ET on HBO and will be available to stream on HBO Max.
You’ve got to hand it to writer/director/producer Nathan Fielder for managing to carve such a specific space for himself at HBO as the guy behind such weird, existential, and intimate series like How To with John Wilson and his latest, The Rehearsal. For anyone who suffers anxiety, the series is like watching that feeling be given a budget and free rein to go work itself out. Structurally, that plays out as Fielder finds strangers who want to experience, or resolve, something critical in their lives and he then gives them the opportunity to run full dress rehearsals around their issue so they can eventually tackle it for real with certainty. The concept itself is fascinating but entirely ridiculous because no matter how meticulous anyone is about anticipating every outcome, there’s no planning for life. But Fielder attempts it anyway with a single-mindedness that’s weirdly compelling, often surprising, and unlike just about anything else out there.
The six-episode season starts out relatively self-contained in the premiere episode, "Orange Juice, No Pulp," as Nathan introduces his first subject, Corr, a man who once lied about having a Master’s degree to impress his new trivia night friends. Now he wants to come clean to his closest and most mercurial friend about what has turned into an escalating fib. It seems a simple enough situation to overcome, but the lengths to which Fielder has to go to navigate and enable the peculiarities of Corr and the friend he’s afraid to tell the truth to is nothing short of jaw-dropping.
There are full scale replicas of apartments and bars, an orchestrated trip to upstate New York, and practically a small repertory of actors hired and trained to facilitate the various levels of rehearsals and deception needed to make Fielder’s experiment work. Fielder, meanwhile, has to meticulously plan and execute essentially a Russian nesting doll of experiments within experiments to keep the playing field as “pure” as possible for Corr to play out all potential outcomes so he’s prepared for whichever one actually comes to fruition with his actual friend.
Fielder then gets even more ambitious with Angela, a deeply Christian 30-something who wants to “rehearse” what it might be like to raise a child. She doesn’t have a candidate for a husband yet, but Fielder agrees to try and facilitate her perfect scenario for a dry run at motherhood by setting her up in a gorgeous rural home in Portland where she can experience parenting in an accelerated fashion. Fielder appoints the home to Angela’s exacting standards for homesteading and gets a small army of parents to agree to lend their children for swap outs in a 24/7 simulation where Angela can “parent” a child who will age up three years every week until the age of 18. With her buy-in, Angela will get a concentrated experience so she can determine if she is ready to parent, and how she’ll be at it.
The scenario becomes so all-encompassing that it plays out for the rest of the season as Fielder then runs two other rehearsals with two other subjects at the same time. Adding to the logistical nightmare, Fielder eventually folds himself into the parenting rehearsal by offering to become Angela’s nonsexual co-parent so he can also partake in the “what if” of childrearing while trying to fashion an experience for Angela that is as revealing and potentially accurate as possible.
Suffice it to say, Fielder’s ability to keep the logistical plates spinning is mind boggling and can only be achieved by the hefty budget that funds Angela’s house, more reproduction sets to rehearse within, and that growing stable of actors who are trained to be as naturalistic and accurate to the situation as possible to make sure the rehearsals feel entirely natural and grounded. In fact, Episode 4, "The Fielder Method,” is all about Fielder going to North Hollywood to train new recruits in an acting class that he ends up joining himself so he can observe the effectiveness of his techniques. It's Fielder basically Inception-ing himself in his own experiment in ways that are simultaneously hilarious and ridiculous.
It takes an exceptionally peculiar and anxious brain to even want to put yourself through what Fielder does to try and help other humans bypass all of the messiness and uncertainty of life. Unlike other reality shows that aim to capture big personalities and their excesses, The Rehearsal is laser focused on the averagely odd. And they prove to Fielder that even the most seemingly mundane people attract an outsized amount of complicated drama in their day-to-day life that is impossible to anticipate with any kind of accuracy. Even when people say they want to committedly resolve issues that have plagued them, Fielder’s experiences reinforce that one can never really plan for the mercurial nature of a spectrum of emotions that don’t operate with any rhyme or reason.
Ultimately, watching Fielding get vexed continuously by the unexpected strangeness of individuals and their choices, as well as the unintended circumstances that come from the hubris of thinking that exceptional planning can solve anything, is a big part of the charm of the series. The comedy writes itself as Fielder keeps getting trapped in the lies he has to construct to help ensure that his rehearsals have any chance of being successful. And then we get to watch the bizarre lengths he’ll go to keep any of the rehearsals going, like making it winter outside of Angela’s house to keep up the guise of time passing quickly, or faking deaths to get a more realistic reaction from one of his subjects. All of it frankly nuts, and matches the absurdity of Fielder’s thesis/quest to control and contain every day uncertainty. But his relentless questioning of himself along the way, and his willingness to make himself a subject of his experiments means even if no one else is learning something about themselves, at least Fielder is and that is kinda fun to watch too.
With only five of six episodes provided by HBO, what Fielder is able to distill out of his various rehearsals remains to be seen in the season finale. Regardless, The Rehearsal reiterates 1) that even the most fastidious human beings have no control over anything and chaos is going to creep into the best laid plans; 2) humans are some strange creatures and Fielder sure did find some doozies for this show; and 3) HBO should keep giving this guy money to continue unleashing his mad brain into the medium.