Written by Andreas Babiolakis

Binge, Fringe, or Singe? is our television series that will cover the latest seasons, miniseries, and more. Binge is our recommendation to marathon the reviewed season. Fringe means it won’t be everyone’s favourite show, but is worth a try (maybe there are issues with it). Singe means to avoid the reviewed series at all costs.

Private investigator Brian Wolfe called comedian, producer, writer, and documentarian Nathan Fielder the “wizard of loneliness” in an episode of the latter’s hilarious series Nathan For You. It was his response to Fielder’s constant attempts at trying to improve businesses and situations in his own weird ways; even if Wolfe was completely in on the jokes of the show, he could see this as Fielder having too much time and being allowed access to too many resources to be doing stupid stuff. Throughout Nathan For You, Fielder exhibits that he actually is lonely. He gets an actress to restate her line (“I love you”) to him countless times in one of my favourite episodes “Smokers Allowed”. He often asks those that ask him for help if they want to hang out after their projects (they always answer “no”). In “Finding Frances”, the series’ brilliant finale, Fielder conjures up fake love with an escort: a relationship that is strictly business, and yet he treats every meet up as the blossoming of a real romance. His own insecurities present a magnifying glass on everyone that watches: what exactly even is reality? It’s what we make of the circumstances that pass around us and through us.

Fielder has stated that “Finding Frances” and “Smokers Allowed” are the major starting points for his latest show, The Rehearsal. The former episode is a lengthy special that tries to find actor Bill Heath’s long lost lover, and is a more serious and tender tone than other Nathan For You episodes. The latter is Fielder’s way of getting a bar to allow smoking: staging it as a play, where the patrons are “actors” and are smoking cigarettes for their roles (he then hires actual actors to painstakingly recreate the monotonous bar activities that happen over the course of an evening). In The Rehearsal, the premise is simple. Fielder meets people who want to take a tough next step in their lives (mainly confrontations with loved ones, like confessions), and helps them practice (like dress rehearsals). He and his crew build exact replicas of where these events will take place (say, if someone wants to hold a tough conversation on trivia night at a bar, the bar would be recreated in full) with that fancy HBO money. He hires actors to play these real people, and either interacts with them himself, or has the people he’s working with practice with them. It gets a little confusing, but that’s kind of the point: we quickly lose sight of what is actually going on at times, before The Rehearsal corrects us.

It seems like The Rehearsal is going to be episodic (a new project each episode) until the end of only episode two (“Scion”), where a mission (a woman, Angela, wants to see what being a mother would be like, and so Fielder hires young actors to play her fictitious son from the ages of three to eighteen over the course of a number of weeks) goes awry. The hired husband-to-be, Robbin, quits the simulation, and Fielder fills in. Suddenly, Fielder is a part of his own experiments. He even tries to keep going as the mastermind of other rehearsals, but this family simulation overtakes his life. This is the real story at the heart of The Rehearsal: Fielder discovering himself in his own projects meant for other people. It’s all Fielder has ever wanted to do: find purpose. He may not have done so here, but he acknowledges that none of us really know what our purposes are. We define our own lives, whether we’re prepared or not. We find our own meaning.

More than any reality show (perhaps ever), The Rehearsal has so much truth within it, despite how much of the series is fully built upon fiction. Then, there’s the other side of the equation: how much of this show actually is real? This blurred line is part of the fun. We’re never truly sure what we can trust, because everything could be set up for appearances. This is the same tightrope that Fielder walks in “Finding Frances”, and actually quite literally in the Nathan For You episode “The Hero” (where he disguises himself as another person and pulls off a tightrope stunt, with the town’s credit going to another person that didn’t do any of the work). We celebrate what we’re told to celebrate. We cry when the command comes up. The Rehearsal is a revelation: no matter how truthful its contents, we still learn a bit about ourselves and how we are conditioned. We may mock Fielder’s over-the-top methods at practicing each event in a myriad of ways, but we’ve been practicing our entire lives. Fielder’s just reminding us how planned, staged, and inauthentic our daily existences are.

Fielder gets incredibly extreme with the amount of detailing that goes into each and every experiment. Each decision made has a plethora of outcomes plotted out on a series of flow charts. Rehearsals get their own rehearsals, which get their own rehearsals. There isn’t a possible end in sight, outside of the season concluding (and even then, HBO has renewed the series for a followup season). Like many others have pointed out, I could only think of Synecdoche, New York whilst watching this, and I felt this way before I read that this was a common realization: the search for how we practice our lives is fruitless, particularly when life never lets us know when it’s a wrap and that we’ve fulfilled great takes. Fielder’s realizations whilst soul searching (within himself, and through guiding others) are major wake up calls for all of us, and especially for Fielder himself. In the final episode “Pretend Daddy”, Fielder has a thought: is putting a child through this experiment ethical? Is putting anyone through this for the greater good? That second question gets a little fuzzy, when Fielder realizes that, yes, The Rehearsal has been beneficial for him after all is said and done. The final image is one of an artist that has painstakingly searched life for real substance (and I do mean real: no cues, no prompts, and no manipulations) and has finally discovered meaning. It’s the perfect place for season one to end.

I can only imagine that we haven’t even seen half of what Fielder and company have recorded. This is likely only the scratching of the surface, cobbled together to create something profound after countless hours in the editing room (a labour that Fielder is quite open about in his works). What is assembled is truly magnificent. The Rehearsal gets me to feel things that not many series have ever achieved. Despite the show being lined up in exactly the same ways that decades of the moving picture mediums have been (with us viewers having been prepped for these responses our entire film and television watching lives), The Rehearsal still feels actually enthralling and connective. I learn about myself watching this, and about those close to me, distant from me, and unfamiliar to me. I understand the wonky wiring in our brains that make us feel unprepared (and yet this, in and of itself, was something we prepared to feel). We learn how to keep going through outcomes from our pasts. Fielder is trying to speed this process up, but he recognizes that this experiment is much larger than he ever could have imagined. No amount of practiced results can set you up for real life more than your actual life already has.

We all act every day. We hide if we are upset so we don’t get asked questions. We pretend to like food served to us by those we care about, as to not hurt their feelings (and they, in return, pretend not to notice our disdain). We play chummy towards those with more authority than us, so we can be in their good books (hell, the fact that we even have good and bad books shows how much we care about responses). We are constantly on our own stage, as our own protagonists within our own productions (this is very Synecdoche, New York, but this is an even stronger example of William Shakespeare’s As You Like It). The Rehearsal is just showing us what’s already there: a series of patterns, commands, actions, and results. We are computing at a high level constantly. Nathan Fielder is just trying to reconfigure this side of the human mechanism. He doesn’t get strict results, but he was never going to. We’ve been programmed for millennia. We’re not going to figure ourselves out overnight as a complicated species. Fielder discovers something more beautiful in The Rehearsal: we are capable of finding ourselves as our own individuals. I haven’t a clue what is in store for the second season, but there’s clearly something up Fielder’s sleeve if HBO has granted him more money to toy around with. If his next steps are even close to be ing as fascinating as the first season of The Rehearsal is, we could very well have a masterpiece of docu-reality television on our hands (yes, even better than Nathan For You if The Rehearsal doesn’t dull down).

Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from Toronto Metropolitan University, as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.

The Rehearsal Season 1: Binge, Fringe, or Singe?

Written by Andreas Babiolakis