Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal is a beautiful monument to the man's insanity and insecurity
Season 1, Episode 1: "Orange Juice, No Pulp"
I think there’s something wrong with Nathan Fielder. Don’t you?
What kind of man goes to the lengths he goes to for the sake of his art? On Nathan For You, we watched him fabricate viral sensations time and time and time again, take advantage of the naivete of children, and even become a man solely to create an entire(ly fake) life story for him. We laugh when we watch him take the trust of proprietors, both kind and unkind, and turn it inside out for the sake of our amusement, because what else are we going to do? Because otherwise, we’re just watching a half hour of a man being a total asshole, whether that be to the business owners or the customers of the business, and we’re not laughing, so why would we be watching it?
But the beauty of Nathan For You is that it’s not automatically a comedy. The humor you and I find in it is subjective. Nathan For You (and, after seeing “Orange Juice, No Pulp”, I would say Nathan Fielder’s comedy as a whole) is about trust, and whether you would place your wallet in the hands of this gangly Canadian man. It’s funny to watch people put their faith in someone who only has artistic entertainment in mind, because it just is. It’s explainable as to why it’s funny, but at the same time, it’s not. The Rehearsal isn’t about a specific kind of person—it’s about anyone, anyone who’s willing to put their hearts in Nathan’s hands. Anyone, for the price of admitting their private issues publicly, gets the chance to live out a conversation that is seriously important to them, and in doing so, is given the opportunity to figure out how to perfect it. Could you do it? Could I?
But now The Rehearsal is here, and we instead get to watch at least six people live this idea for us, starting with Kor Skeet, trivia enthusiast and fake possessor of a Masters Degree. The instant I saw his mannerisms, I knew exactly why Nathan had picked him. On Nathan For You, there were two kinds of people featured—someone you couldn’t pick out in a crowd, and someone that stood out in every way imaginable. Kor is the latter. His biggest lie (that he’s willing to admit to on camera) is about his educational accolades as it relates to his trivia group, something he seems to value above almost everything else. Kor is unlike us because his hair looks painted on and he has a funny way of speaking, but at the same time, Kor is exactly like us, because don’t we all have something a little silly that we consider life-or-death important?
Despite having an older biological brother, The Rehearsal seemingly finds a soul sibling in Fielder-produced How To with John Wilson. While Nathan For You is significantly more about the comedy, (even if I’ll maintain that it is up to the viewer whether it’s actually funny or not) The Rehearsal and How To are more about the very idea of watching it to begin with. Both have the intent of capturing some aspect of the world. How To wants to immortalize reality itself, to present both an unbiased and enhanced view of the world around us, but The Rehearsal wants us to focus on the individual and the human mind. It wants us to imagine the emotions inside others that we could feel but choose not to amplify to such an extreme—to put ourselves in the head of someone who would be willing to tell all.
But at the same time, like Nathan For You, it wants us to think of that show’s title character, a man who would go to lengths that border on insanity just for the sake of his art, or, as both shows imply, for the sake of human connection. Think of the scene from “Smokers Allowed” (which I feel is the most Rehearsal episode Nathan For You had) where he has an actress say “I love you” to him at least ten times. He wants more than just a good show. He wants something deeper, even if that means having to control the entire situation around him perfectly. Throughout the episode, he manipulates Kor’s reality—loading their skeet shooting guns with blanks to foster a sense of “we both suck” friendship, coming up with pre-planned jokes based on his recreation of Kor’s apartment, opening up the slightest bit to the man before having a paid actor interrupt the moment. Nathan For You required a certain amount of Nathan playing puppet master for it to work, but in The Rehearsal, Nathan is the god of puppets, and what title sounds lonelier than the god of puppets?
“I’m not good at meeting people for the first time,” Nathan tells the audience as he says hello to the real Kor. It’s something that most people watching can probably relate to, but part of the fun of The Rehearsal is watching just how far he’ll go to get it done. After realizing a couple things about his interaction with Kor were off, (a joke about plungers didn’t land and Kor’s chair made him look smaller than it did in his recreated apartment) Nathan has a popular trivia bar scoped out and recreates one main room flawlessly, right down to the chunks missing from a couple of old chairs in the corner. The image above of all the actors heading to the fake bar is beautifully surreal, and the thought alone is one of my favorite things in the episode.
Kor’s rehearsals are also another highlight of the episode, as we get glimpses of Nathan’s insanely detailed dialogue tree he has prepared for the man and get to see what Kor would do in the face of a worst-case scenario. Nathan has him run through a nightmare scene in which his friend Tricia not only lays into him for his lie, but the patrons of the bar overhear and start to ridicule him. Kor stares blankly, but the way he positions himself reeks of genuine fear. It’s kind of a smart idea—it’s almost impossible that the entire bar would notice Kor’s predicament, even if Tricia took his truth poorly, so why not live this improbability out? But it also builds tension for the audience as we near closer and closer to the real thing, putting us in Kor’s head (just as I said it would!) and leaving us to wonder just how things will play out.
But then things do play out. When Tricia sits down, Kor sticks to the script to a T, using pre-planned jokes just as Nathan did to him. He becomes Nathan in this scene, really—those around him might as well be Nathan’s hired extras for the fake bar, and Tricia is him, an unknowing participant in Kor’s constructed game. (But even here, Nathan pulls the strings by sneakily getting a copy of all of that night’s trivia questions and subtly feeding Kor the answers through use of random extras.) Nathan has advised him on several perfect moments to come clean, but Kor doesn’t take them—and, in a genius move, we spend almost a full minute of runtime with Kor silently agonizing over his choice. The show doesn’t cut for time or try to distract us, it just lets us sit by Kor’s side and silently urge him to just say it already—and then he does. And then he keeps talking, and talking, and talking long after Tricia has assured him that it’s no big deal, being more honest with her than he’s ever been in their over a decade of friendship. Like How To, The Rehearsal demonstrates a moment of raw, untampered humanity here—Kor goes off-script, reveals his information in a way that he wasn’t sure if he was comfortable with. He wins the game Nathan set up for him by not playing it, and by showing a little courage, he has a more emotionally rewarding conversation than he could have ever hoped for when he started this process.
But The Rehearsal isn’t about Kor. It’s about Nathan, and how far he’s willing to go for that connection that Kor has now strengthened. By the end of the show, he acknowledges that he’s been toying with his new “friend” the entire time, and worst of all, he subconsciously enabled the man to unintentionally cheat at his biggest passion. Guilt-ridden, he gets Kor’s actor to run rehearsals of what his admission may look like, but we only see one—the worst-case, where the actor lays into him. And, in another brilliant move, we suddenly cut to the actual conversation Nathan has with Kor, where he instead opts to give him an awkward compliment before they part ways. Kor is more than what Nathan wants—he’s what Nathan wants to be, but he can’t. He’s placed himself in the same position that Kor did with his friends, where he has a lie that he’s so certain the oblivious party would be furious at if it was revealed. But even with the option to prepare for it, he just can’t do it—such is the nature of Nathan Fielder. With The Rehearsal, Nathan is looking inside himself as much as he is other people, pointing out his failings where others succeed. With his new HBO backers, it’s clear from this episode alone that he has a much larger budget than ever before, but even with all that money, he’s still strange, awkward Nathan, god of puppets. And what title sounds lonelier than that?
Rating: 9/10 (A-)
I’m so familiar with Nathan’s bag of tricks that I instantly knew who the “gas company” workers were the instant he referenced them.
There were just a couple jokes that took up time yet didn’t land for me in this episode, despite how ambitious it was, namely Nathan trying to get the blog name right while he and Kor were driving.
I like how Tricia mentioned her roommates both times they got her on camera.
The actors he hired to play Kor and Tricia both did great jobs, but I was seriously wowed with how well Tricia’s actress nailed her after one interview with the woman.
The weird excuses Nathan makes up and has other people say will always be funny to me, namely in this episode when he has Kor get a guy to move tables because of his grandmother’s supposed brain cancer.
Nathan, on Kor’s copy of How to Make Love All Night and Drive a Woman Wild: “I think we’re gonna get along pretty well.”
“Door city over here.”
“But kids died in the factory.” “Well, they supposedly died.”
“It’s days like these that I curse the Chinese for inventing gunpowder.”
“Sometimes you don’t want to say anything, but you do want people to know you exist.”