The Rehearsal: Our verdict on the new series by Nathan Fielder

The Rehearsal.

Married reviewers Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie watch a show where all is not what it seems, or is it?

SCORES
Innovation: 5
Outlandishness: 5
Unreality: 5

SHE SAW

I hated the first episode of The Rehearsal. Nathan Fielder convinces a man called Kor that the best way to prepare for telling a friend that he's been lying to them for years about having a master's degree is to rehearse the conversation ad nauseam in an exact replica of the bar in which they're going to meet. Kor appears to be genuinely seeking Fielder's help with his absurd process as well as seemingly being fine with documenting it for a television show but the whole thing felt so deceitful that it made me deeply uncomfortable.

Fielder is known for his "docu-reality" series Nathan for You in which he gave flailing businesses outlandish strategies to help get them on their feet. Despite being hailed as genius, I couldn't get into that show either, because it felt like he was belittling the businesses and their real desire to become successful by giving them bad business advice for laughs. It's not dissimilar to the Borat concept except Fielder's playing himself and the people he's taking advantage of don't appear to have the despicable beliefs that Sacha Baron Cohen satirises.

The second episode opens with a woman putting a baby in a cot and exiting the room. A crew of people then climb in the window, retrieve the baby and replace it with a different baby, while Fielder watches on monitors at an undisclosed location. It's disturbing to watch out of context, which is exactly what Fielder is going for. He's a boundary-pusher. As he later explains, this scenario is about a woman "rehearsing" what it's like to raise a child, using baby actors who are only allowed to work 4-hour shifts, so are swapped out when the woman isn't looking. It's an outrageous premise, comically so, but one I'm much more comfortable with than whatever kidnapping scenario I was made to imagine in the first few minutes of the episode.

By episode three, it gets increasingly hard to tell what's real and by episode four, there are rehearsals within rehearsals within rehearsals as Fielder seeks to recreate the most authentic experience possible for the participants in the show. It begins to get very complicated and your ability to decipher what's ethical and unethical, real and simulated gets challenged repeatedly.

Early on, Greg became convinced that most of the key players were actors. I'm not so sure, and it's not something Fielder is just going to reveal. But the more blurry and complex the rehearsals become, the more I've started to see The Rehearsal not as some cringey prank show but as a cerebral exploration into the human psyche and a slowly unfolding commentary on simulation theory. My hasty hatred has become profound intrigue.

HE SAW

It's not often you can say you have watched an episode of television that completely upends everything you thought was possible in a given medium, but that's what the first episode of The Rehearsal did to me. Midway through the second episode, I was wondering if what I'd thought I was watching was actually something quite different. By midway through the third episode, I was rethinking my rethinking and by midway through the fourth episode I was so confused, I no longer found thinking a useful way to approach it. I had to just sit back and allow the waves of reality and unreality to crash over me, figuring I would try and work it all out later. But here we are, days later and I have reached no conclusions, nor even had any insights I would describe as useful.

When Zanna asked me what I thought of the show, I tried to express something like the above. I went on for several minutes and was aware I wasn't making much sense. When I finished, she said, "Hmmm, that's a bit too esoteric. I was hoping to write something funny."

That was understandable because The Rehearsal is often funny and could probably be called comedy, although the humour is undercut by darkness, which is mostly related to questions of exploitation, given that it at least nominally uses a range of real people who appear to not be aware of the fact their plights are going to be turned into comedy. These questions of exploitation might be rendered irrelevant if, as I suspect - although Zanna is unconvinced - the "real people" are actually actors.

In episode four, Fielder plays an actor taking an acting class called "The Fielder Method", which is taught by an actor playing Fielder. The other students in the class are unquestionably actors, but are they actors taking a class or actors playing actors taking a class?

By this stage, I was buried under so many layers of artifice and trickery I could see no way out, nothing to hold on to, no chance to ground myself in some sort of reality. I began to question everything about the show, even the many articles and social media comments calling it exploitative. How many people are in on the joke? Is there even a joke? I said to Zanna: "Are you having trouble keeping up with where they are in the reality continuum?"
"No," she replied.

The Rehearsal is now streaming on Neon.