Nathan juggles dad duties on The Rehearsal
Plus, Patrick preps for a serious talk with his brother
TV Reviews Rehearsal
We are three episodes into Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal and it’s a testament to this slippery nonfiction series that I’m both worried and comforted by how much Fielder seems to be leaning into the controlled chaos he’s concocted with his outlandish premise. Looking back, episode one—where Fielder helped a Brooklyn man rehearse a hard conversation with a trivia pal—feels almost quaint compared to where we are today. Once a removed director/puppeteer of sorts, Fielder has since involved himself in one of his rehearsals: He’s now playing Dad to a series of kids, helping Angela figure out whether she’s cut out for that homesteader mom life. I had originally assumed we’d just keep following his stint at Angela’s country house where chickens need to be tended, gardens need to be irrigated, and kids need to figure out why mommy doesn’t want to celebrate Halloween. (It’s a time when Satanists perform sacrifices. Only, don’t try to Google it, as the search engine suppresses such information, being controlled by the Devil himself, obviously.) Instead, it seems Fielder will continue to stage rehearsals for other folks as he juggles his duties as Dad and man of the house.
In addition to increasing his daily workload, inserting himself in Angela’s rehearsal has one bonus: Fielder now has firsthand experience in how these exercises can and do affect his participants. It’s one thing to treat these rehearsals as exactly that, moments when folks rehearse lines and arguments. It’s another to prepare someone for the emotional beats said conversations will elicit. He arrives at this epiphany when he realizes he’s running through the motions of being a dad but can never quite connect to what that feels. He’s constantly seeing the strings being pulled, after all, and struggles to lose himself in the fantasy he knows is so necessary to make such a rehearsal work. “Feelings are hard to engineer,” he muses toward the end of the episode. “There’s only so much you can do to deceive yourself.”
If I find myself surprised at how skillfully Fielder’s series would turn out to be a meditation on theories of performance (check the title, Manuel!), it’s only because its premise so obviously courted a kind of hands-on self-help therapy that I worried would be the key concern in every episode. Except, as much as Fielder does want to help the likes of Patrick, who needs to sit down his brother to demand his rightful share of their grandfather’s inheritance, the writer/director/producer/make-believe-Dad-to-Adam is clearly more fascinated by the meta questions these exercises bring up: What is the line between reality and performance? Can we truly practice our way out of difficult situations? Would we even want to?
And, of course, at every beat, Fielder keeps pushing us into murkier ethical territory the more he manipulates his “guests.” (Is that an accurate way of describing folks like Patrick and Angela?) Orchestrating a fake real-life bonding experience with an actor hired to play a grandpa who’s then pronounced dead—all for the sake of triggering the feelings Patrick would need to get through to his brother—is a fascinating moment of emotional manipulation. Or, meta-manipulation since this was a finely tuned rehearsal where everyone knew what was up except Patrick himself. We’re past role playing as prep. This was improv as real life, a kind of immersive (and coercive) take on method training where Fielder decided the only way to nudge Patrick to the core emotional place he needed to arrive at would be by actually tapping into those feelings in the context of an experience he did live through.
Just as I wondered with Kor in episode one, I am curious what, if anything, Patrick makes of this now that the episode has aired. Consent forms no doubt were signed and legally we wouldn’t be watching his story play out were all of that not taken care of. But his absence—and the lack of closure because of it—should force us to question who these highly produced rehearsals are for.
The more Fielder gets involved in Adam’s life (however we choose to think of an “Adam” that’s played by various kids and soon enough teenagers), the clearer it may become that this is all for his benefit more so than for, say, Angela’s. But his insertion is slowly making The Rehearsal feel like an ouroboros of a proposition. (“Nathan” is both director and protagonist, proctor and guinea pig.) What this might do to future attempts to help others is up in the air, but I have a feeling we’ll be going deeper and deeper into this metafictional rabbit hole before we emerge (hopefully unscathed?) on the other side.
Stray observations
- I’m not going to pretend like hearing a kid say “That’s Batman’s mommy” about Catwoman did not upset me. It was a nice reminder, though, that I don’t need a rehearsal to know I am definitely not cut out for responsible parenting.
- I was not expecting “digital mirrors” to become key props in a show like The Rehearsal but boy was that some Black Mirror stuff.
- Then again, I was also not prepared for such offhanded antisemitism but I was glad Fielder not only addressed it on the spot but also kept it in the episode. (At some point, we’ll have to talk about the kind of curation that’s taking place at the level of editing for we’re obviously getting a decidedly trimmed and narrativized look into these various “rehearsals.”)
- “Not everything is make-believe. Some things are real.” On the surface, this throwaway line by Angela feels like a précis of Fielder’s entire enterprise. He’s intent on finding the reality in make-believe. Or to make make-believe into a kind of reality. Except, as Fielder’s voice over toward the end of the episode suggests, such a line runs away from being a statement about performance or the power of the stage (the way, say, a great fictional moment can move you or can give you catharsis in a way a real-life conversation may not) and becomes instead a rallying cry for conspiracy theories that require believing in outlandish grand narratives that help folks structure their world accordingly. Like, say, opting to not celebrate Halloween because of its “Satanic origins” despite the Celtic roots such a holiday historically has. I asked last time how the show had cast its participants and here may be a clue: The people who’d be not only susceptible to but amenable to the kind of controlled reality Fielder and his crew concoct are those who may already believe the environment around them operates under similar circumstances. Namely: There are folks pulling the strings, swapping your kids, and maybe even planting store-bought green peppers in your garden. Only, you know, on a grander scale.
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I asked last time how the show had cast its participants and here may be a clue: The
people who’d be not only susceptible to but amenable to the kind of
controlled reality Fielder and his crew concoct are those who may
already believe the environment around them operates under similar
circumstances. Namely: There are folks pulling the strings, swapping
your kids, and maybe even planting store-bought green peppers in your
garden. Only, you know, on a grander scale.
That is a great point, especially considering some thoughts I’ve recently encountered on how much a show like this is exploitation and manipulation. Like, do I think fucking with Patrick to such a degree is okay? No. It is funny to watch (not funny haha, funny insane) and elaborate enough for me to not know whether to react with amusement or fear. Do I feel bad for a person who wears a punisher necklace and casually flaunts some antisemitism? Not really. Do I feel bad for the person who lost their grandfather and connection to his brother which clearly runs deeper than what we will ever know (or should know) from this show? Yes.
Same goes for Angela. She seems nice and loving towards the children, and then turns around to say something totally insane which makes me think “good thing you have no children”. But. In the end it does really need a certain type of person to roll with a parenthood simulation or the concept of a rehearsal which needs you to believe that real life can be practiced in the first place.
I want to see Angela drop her fake nice facade and finally go full crazy lady! (Btw can you imagine her what her FB feed must be like?)
Lots of quotes in mixed fonts, with weirdly specific details (e.g. It’s an AMANDA thing), maybe next to a picture of a minion. All religious themed, with no direct quotes from the bible.
It just occurred to me, but who is taking care of all her cats while she’s away?
Fielder’s schtick is, almost by definition, exploitative and manipulative. But it’s also been relatively harmless, or at least that’s what I tell myself. Having some yogurt company sell shit-flavored yogurt for a day, or even dragging some poor strangers up a mountain for a $4.78 rebate, doesn’t strike me as doing a lot of harm, even if it may not be super nice, and even if offering folks up for our amusement with promises of increased profits itself isn’t super nice. Even the first couple of episodes of this show struck me as pretty harmless stuff. But man, there is something that feels completely fucked up about contriving a situation for someone to get close to another person, and then is made to legitimately believe not only that the other person dies, but that now they are suddenly in a conflict with a member of that person’s family over their inheritance, and now have to defend their relationship in the middle of grieving. That’s fucked up, and I’m not sure what justification there is for that. Pretty troubling also that Fielder never heard from the guy again. I guess you hope because he experienced such a cathartic moment from the rehearsal that he saw no further need for Fielder’s services. I also have a fair amount of trepidation over how this co-parenting situation is going to resolve, and how much more he is going to manipulate this crazy woman. (Also, what kind of show is this exactly? All shows like this, including Nathan for You and seemingly the first couple episodes of The Rehearsal, have been clearly comedies. I don’t recall laughing once last night or thinking “This is funny!”).
Pretty troubling also that Fielder never heard from the guy again.That’s the sort of thing I’m skeptical of. For the most part, I believe that the people that Nathan says aren’t actors are real, but when Nathan says that something happens that we don’t see, I take it with a grain of salt. I think Nathan For You is a brilliant work, but when you start reading interviews and behind the scenes, you find out that they omitted several things or condensed events in editing.Personally, I’m fine with that. I don’t think it diminishes anything. I’m sure Patrick really had a genuine moment with the actor that played his brother, and it probably did freak him out. But I don’t believe for a second that the producers and/or Nathan himself didn’t talk to him again.I agree that this is episodic was a lot less comedic.
So you think Fielder lied when he said he never heard from the guy again?
Yes.
“It’s all fake” is always the most interesting and welcome take.
Uh… that’s specifically not what I said. I take many things the show presents as real at face value. But I’m skeptical when it comes to some things that are glossed over through voice-over. Even within the text of the show, Nathan Fielder is an unreliable narrator.
Okay, cool, kinda the point I was sardonically making is if you just think it’s fake, there’s not anything more to discuss. You think Fielder just outright lied? Okay, not really anything to say to that.
You asked me if I thought he lied about one specific thing, and I answered. You could’ve just not replied if that wasn’t the answer you were looking for. I would argue that the elements that are fake enhance the elements that are real, even if (perhaps especially if) the viewer is unaware which parts are fake or real. That’s my take.
I don’t know that it’s necessary to reconstruct this conversation from scratch, but since that seems to be the direction this was taking, you responded to a specific thing I said about a specific thing that happened, and your response to that was essentially that the thing I was analyzing didn’t even happen the way it was portrayed, that I was disturbed by something that was fake. All I did was ask a clarifying question to see if your take was, in fact, the most boring one possible (from a conversational perspective). Like, I understand that a half hour show does not portray everything that happens in a days- or weeks-long interaction, that stuff gets manipulated in editing, but that doesn’t lead me to think when Fielder states a verifiable fact outright, that he’s lying. Nor do I understand why it’s so hard to believe that the guy had no further contact with Fielder or the producers (pretty easy to avoid contact with people). Not to say you couldn’t be right…I have no evidence beyond what Fielder said on the show last night. But, if that’s the case, a pretty interesting organic development is just a lazy contrived lie, which isn’t interesting to discuss.
Oh, I can believe that Patrick chose to avoid future contact. I don’t have evidence that Fielder was lying either. But consider that Fielder says Patrick invited him to the amusement park but by the time he got there, his phone had died, he couldn’t find him, and then he “never heard from him again.” …So how did he know Patrick’s phone died? If Patrick decided to end all contact, he could’ve shut off his phone, or blocked Fielder’s number. And I don’t believe this entire segment would’ve made it to air without someone eventually reaching Patrick, if only to make sure he didn’t die or something. But that gets into, how do you define “heard from,” how do you define “I” (does he just mean himself, or the entire production team?), and how do you define “lie” (some people think a half-truth is a lie).I didn’t think any of that was interesting, because I didn’t think it detracted from the emotional component of the episode and because I made all the points I wanted to make in my first reply, so I just replied “yes.”And you chose to be unnecessarily rude about it instead of just not replying.
So that’s the thing. I’m not interested in debating whether a verifiable thing Nathan Fielder said on his show is a lie, and I especially don’t find it interesting poring over the minutiae of an interaction to try to get to the bottom of it. I apologize if you truly think that’s interesting and if you truly thought debating that is what I was going for here, or otherwise thought that would be an interesting avenue of debate from my post.
Apologizing for how I might have hypothetically felt (ignoring that I said I felt the opposite) instead of for going out of your way to be rude is interesting and welcome.
The part about Patrick’s phone dying reminded me of a naive person not being willing to believe that they are, in fact, being ghosted and that the other party has just blocked their number. That kind of self-lie seems very in-character for Nathan in this show.
100% this!
Those thoughts you had were implanted by Satan: who as a side project also runs Google.
There’s a non-zero chance that this whole show is a meta-prank on the audience is somehow its own rehearsal.
wait… you think that a man who is accused by his brother to have married a gold digger who is after their grandfather’s inheritance goes on a trip with somebody else’s grandfather to dig up literal gold only to unwittingly end up inheriting part of the gold he helped dig up from that stranger’s grandfather less than a week later isn’t funny?Also, the more unethical the show gets the more convinced I am he is making US believe some of these people are real when in fact it’s all fiction.
I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.
“I can’t tell if you’re being serious or not.” And that’s the tagline of the show.
Agreed.
“Also, the more unethical the show gets the more convinced I am he is making US believe some of these people are real when in fact it’s all fiction.”this keeps crossing my mind.
No funny moments? I laughed heartily at Patrick squirming when confronted with his anti-semitism, Nathan’s physical comedy in his ‘dad’ role, the madness of the aging mirrors, th absurdity of the ‘emotional rehearsal’, planting zucchinis like carrots, the sticker on the bell peper and Nathan’s reaction to it and more moments that I can’t think of from the top of my head. It’s not the overt Borat-lite humour from Nathan For You, but I’m laughing for sure.
….but did you cringe?
I would not take any of Nathan’s stuff at face value regarding how it’s put together. He engineers a situation where people agree to be on camera – as many people will do anything to be on camera – and then it really becomes about what people are willing to say while on camera, both the bad (say, blatant anti-Semitism) and the good (deep personal revelations). I’m not saying he’s the most ethical guy in the world, and I have no idea what he tells or withholds, but generally people know they’re getting into something weird, have no problem with it, and tell on themselves on camera.
lol this comment thread almost turned into an episode of The Rehearsal where they discuss the Rehearsal. fwiw i agree with Killa K. this show is a comedy show (likeN4U) and the whole point is to entertain the audience. these are real reactions from real ppl, which makes the show very interesting, but the narrative itself is constructed to make those reactions make sense to us and also be entertaining (or in this episode’s case — thoughtful/emotional). i’m sure they *try* to stick as close to the real events as possible but sometimes you just gotta edit and do a voice over.
Why such low grades? This is a remarkable show. Manuel, Fielder is also Jewish, which should get a mention in the review as another layer to that scene which, as a Jew, had me dying. The show is also very Jewish in how it interrogates the ethics of these situations, much the way a rabbi might interrogate questions in the Torah. That’s a reason why so many Jews go into law and the arts, because it’s pretty ingrained in the culture.Fielder is both prankster and empath in some ways. He makes us think these people are ridiculous and then engineers moments where we feel intense sympathy, as when Patrick talks about how he hasn’t been able to grieve and every day feels like the day after their dad died. It’s, as I said, remarkable.The fact that Nathan is recently divorced and it seems he’s dealing with it by creating a show where he can live out what his life would have been like had he stayed married and had a family as a working dad is so sadly affecting. It’s no coincidence he sprinkled that stuff in each episode prior to this (talks about the divorce EP 1, shows the cats and talks about not having kids EP 2). This episode wasn’t quite as funny as previous episodes and yet I still belly laughed like 5 times, only to get choked up by Patrick. Crazy.
Insightful post, agree with your point about him working the divorce into the narrative but feel the need to be a pedant and point out he’s not /that/ recently divorced. I think it was sometime during the run of Nathan for you which is many years ago now.
Yup you’re right – I knew it was during Nathan For You I just forgot how long ago NFY was!
I agree with Zwing. The New York Magazine interview Fielder did prior to the season is full of discussion of this aspect of Fielder’s life – his prev and current relationships is all he discloses about himself personally. He’s in a new relationship, he says. Maybe it is fresh again?
So was Nathan going through a divorce before, during, or after the finale of “Nathan For You”?
I started watching last night, before bed, but had to shut it off after
her satanism rant. Those kind of people are just like… I can’t.
Religious nuts make me lose my shit. And I knew I wasn’t going to be able to sleep if I continued because I’d be so worked up. Maybe I’ll try again during the day.
As it happens all religions are nuts….
Go figure.
This is my first experience with Nathan Fielder, and I’m not entirely sure what to think. Everything is so contrived, it’s hard to take any of it seriously. Like, when Nathan and Kor were walking around and Nathan was trying to “incept” him; how does anyone take that seriously? If a “cop” and a “construction worker” just randomly start spouting facts at me when I just happen to be on some weird reality show, I’d immediately start looking at Nathan and be “What the fuck is this ?”, but Kor just seemingly rolls with it.I suppose there is a core element of people dealing with difficult situations and the real emotions involved in that, even if so far they all seem to be kind of weirdos. The real miracle to me is that Nathan is able to find people to humor him and his “practicing at life” scenarios, but I suppose there’s always people who’ll do what it takes to get on tv.
Jeez the reviews for this show are weird.
Nathan’s been giving us some of the most fascinatingly strange moments of television in awhile, and this guy just keeps handing out “B” grades with no explanation of why!
i think it’s bc all the liberal tv review outlets don’t really know how to react bc the fans don’t know how to react. usually the outlets can kind of just follow the natural discourse that surround shows but this one defies everything theyve ever tried to review
anyone else getting a “Review” vibe from this show now that the decisions of the past episodes, Nathan signing on as the dad for example, are starting to build. Nathan, like Forrest, is trying to get something from the show he can’t get anywhere else, in his case the family and relationships that elude him in his real life. The Rehearsal, just like Review is feeding on its host, hopefully nathan makes it out with more than Forrest did.
Oh god Angela is such a piece of work. She’s lie a hippie Q-Anon believer. I mean… when she mentioned Bohemian Grove, I truly did a spit take.
Kinda disappointed a headline that starts off with “Nathan Juggles” has nothing to do with Nathan Rabin, Juggalos, or ICP.
One of the most subversive, fascinating things ever on TV adds another wild layer with serious emotional complexity and it’s a B-. Woof
An interesting aspect of this show and the whole “MANIPULATIVE EXPLOITER!!!!!” discourse-flavored thing happening on Twitter about it is what it says about reality TV as a genre. An integral part of the reality TV experience is direct consent to be exploited. That’s what it is. Whether you’re signing up to show how horrifying your hoarding house is, or have your personal life aired with the most painful parts highlighted as you compete for a chance to marry The Bachelor or win American Ninja Warrior, you’re agreeing, and in some cases damn near BEGGING to be exploited. Fielder is just showing the other side of that so that people can’t pretend that’s what they’re watching, but don’t fool yourself into thinking it’s more exploitative than The Bachelor.
The show makes me miss Nathan For You. NFY was gut-wrenchingly funny. This is something adjacent but not the same.