The Rehearsal review: Reality TV, social experiment, autocritique rolled into one

Describing a show like The Rehearsal is as tricky as it gets. The show began as a social experiment of sorts, where the Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder would help people rehearse anxiety-inducing milestone moments in their lives. But with each episode, it kept expanding into a larger amorphous entity. That intoxicating sense of what else it might mutate into every Friday was what kept me and everyone else watching for six weeks. As I worked on my review, I almost wished Nathan Fielder would help me rehearse this copy, para by para, word by word, before I sent in the final draft to my editor. When the first episode came out, it may have been easy to dismiss the show as reality TV at its manipulative best or worst. By the end however, it had turned into a form of autocritique. Whatever criticisms we may have had were being subsumed and confronted by the show itself. It seems as he was making it, Fielder became aware of the faulty mechanics of his own device, from the discrepancy between the real and the simulated to the unforeseen emotional fallout of his grand experiment. As performance became reality and reality performance, we watch him struggle to operate from a Brechtian remove, thereby exposing how turning real life into a staged rehearsal can end up dehumanising the subject. Given the show occupies an unstable liminal space between documentary and fiction, the viewer is often left wondering if the subjects are actors themselves and the whole thing scripted. While the reality TV aspects no doubt feel manipulative, it also reflects our modern landscape of oversharing, where we may be abetting the surveillance state by living our lives and feeding every aspect of it to social media like an audience is always watching. The show thus serves a vital reminder of how essential privacy is to be our authentic selves and sustain authentic relationships.

The Rehearsal not only acts as its own criticism, but also Fielder’s previous work on Nathan for You, where he would help struggling small businesses turn things around with his degree from “one of Canada’s top business schools.” To do so, he would pose as a well-meaning but socially awkward version (similar to the fictionalised version of himself he plays on The Rehearsal), and deadpan the business-owners into pulling off the most ridiculously elaborate stunts by luring them with the promise of overhaul. The Rehearsal takes a more self-critical approach of the ruses he was able to pull by pulling another ruse. I constantly get caught in anxiety spirals where I am obsessing over every detail of an encounter and wondering how it could have gone differently. As someone whose mind is prone to such repetitive thought patterns, I understand the appeal of a rehearsal. I often do it myself — before a job interview, a date, or a difficult phone call — in my head without HBO’s budget at my ready disposal. Even if I did, I know rehearsing for various contingencies would only feed into the obsession for control — a structural design flaw to the experiment.

Playing the role of a middle-man to the worriers on the show, Fielder is offering them a way to navigate the uncertainties of life, by not leaving anything to chance. Whether it is a confession of a lie or a confrontation with a brother, he breaks the stressful scenario down to all the constants and variables, builds a flow chart to game out the various permutations, and helps the subjects run through the contingencies via trial and error. Even if he tries to stay four steps ahead of how the scenario may conceivably map out, life still has a way of surprising you. In the season premiere, we meet pub quizzer Kor Skeete who has been lying to his friends about having a master’s degree due to personal insecurities. As the lie starts to eat him up, he enlists Fielder’s help to rehearse a confession to his friend. Fielder builds a replica of the bar where the confession will take place, hires actors to play Tricia as well as the customers and employees, and prepares Skeete for every moment, from the Hello to the order to the confession to the apology. But there are always unknowns that can’t be foreseen, even though Fielder tries to eliminate them by rehearsing his own conversations with the subjects.

The second subject, Angela, is an evangelical Christian eager to rehearse for the role of a mother. Fielder moves her into a remote farmhouse somewhere in Oregon. Child actors, who play her son Adam from an infant to an eighteen-year-old, are sneaked in and out of the windows every week to expedite the simulation. As labour laws don’t allow children to work at night, the actors are replaced by a doll that cries at regular intervals. The whole production is so painfully elaborate and absurd Angela’s scenario becomes a season-long thread, rather than a standalone episode. When she can’t find a partner to help her raise Adam, Nathan fills in as a pretend-father. As they play house, Fielder’s soft-spoken demeanour manages to cajole the most strident views out of Angela, who proves less likeable and more obnoxious as the season goes on. And as we start to see her less as a person, more as a character in a sadcom, Fielder is questioning the morality of reality TV viewing. The answer and the consequences of his own experiment Fielder himself won’t realise till the finale. Remy, one the child actors hired to play Adam, grows too attached to Fielder. Being all but six and raised by a single mom, Remy continues to call Fielder “daddy” even after the experiment ends, struggling to differentiate between reality and fantasy. Fielder first rehearses what he could have done to avoid this uncomfortable situation with older actors playing Remy, and then plays Remy’s mom to understand what it means to be in a subject’s shoes from an intimate distance. The show comes full circle in a way. Skeete, in the premiere, describes Fielder as “Willy Wonka” and himself as “Charlie Bucket.” Fielder isn’t quite sold on the analogy. “Wasn’t he a bad guy?” he wonders. “Well, but he’s a dream maker,” replies Skeete. “You’re making some dreams happen for me.” As The Rehearsal transformed from a docuseries to a morality play, Fielder turned out to be both Wonka and Bucket. The complexity of the concept may have been hard to grasp in the beginning, but Fielder’s genius, as always, tends to sneak up on you. All six episodes of The Rehearsal are now streaming on Disney+ Hotstar.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and music writer based in Bengaluru. Read all the  Latest News ,  Trending News ,  Cricket News ,  Bollywood News ,  India News  and  Entertainment News  here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram