Nathan Fielder’s new HBO series “The Rehearsal” is brilliant, of course. It’s too meticulous with its details and design to be anything less. Apartments and fast food restaurants are meticulously recreated (with extras) to become live sets, conversations are planned for every possible outcome, all for the purpose of helping someone prepare for a moment they have only been imagining from a safe distance. “The Rehearsal” is about everyone involved getting lost in Fielder’s production of pure imagination—the subject, the viewer, and Fielder—a world that tries to beat reality with fascinating dedication and laugh-out-loud emotional revelations.
READ MORE: ‘What We Do in the Shadows’ Review: Season 4 Is Familiar, But Still Wickedly Funny
Fielder pitches the concept with a pilot episode that seems like a one-off: a trivia night enthusiast named Skeet has a secret that he has been hiding from his friend Tricia, for shame and fear of how they would react. It’s a conversation he has avoided for a long time, and after answering Fiedler’s broad Craigslist ad, Fielder appears in his apartment, wanting to help. (We soon learn that Fielder has been extensively rehearsing this conversation himself, with a Skeet stand-in, on a soundstage that looks like Skeet’s apartment.) Fielder is going to help Skeet have this conversation by being prepared for any possible outcome. Minute details about pizza availability, or booth space, or whatever Tricia wants to talk about, can have a massive impact. Fielder finds a clever (and mighty goofy) way to study Tricia and control the variables of a trivia night that Skeet insists on playing; meanwhile, Skeet practices his dialogue over and over, in a scrape-for-scrape recreated bar, for hours each day. Among its many fascinating layers, Fielder’s storytelling is driven by the revealing line between real and fiction, and how the craft of acting can allow someone to cross it. And as some of the series’ best moments depict, Fielder can only prep someone so much before they have to make the leap themselves.
“The Rehearsal” is Fielder’s destined, holy fusion of his inner Andy Kaufman and Charlie Kaufman, owing to the sneaky humanity of both and to their revealing fixation on detail. Nathan has always had an Andy Kaufman bent, playing a character of uncertain size, and in this case, he creates an emotional enigma who is gently sketched throughout the process. Fielder is often very funny here, and just as ironically charismatic while trying to be as dry as possible. His presence is also nourished by when we think—we can only guess—that we get to see the real Nathan Fielder. He knows how to use himself as a supporting character in his own experiments, maintaining his appeal of having genuine intent.
READ MORE: ‘Fourth of July’ Review: Outrage Aside, Louis C.K.’s Comeback Attempt Is A Dud
This project also takes on the enormous emotional scale of Charlie Kaufman’s meta work, specifically “Synecdoche, New York,” in which Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character recreated his life inside a warehouse. There are many moments in this series that are like stepping into a real-life Charlie Kaufman movie, like when we see the bar that Fielder and his team recreate. There is so much effort here that is not about the joke, but a manic creative drive. Fielder continues to be like no other in mainstream comedy, and he offers us a new perspective on how we choose to interact with the world around us.
With many episodes written (or co-written) by Fielder and directed by him, “The Rehearsal” gets an immense drive from its focus on this extensive process. His incredible editing team gives us a rich sense of how long these projects go on, how many production hours are in each day that we barely even see, and how many large chunks of these endeavors are just about getting it right. Without his cohesion and scope, it would fall apart as such a touching piece of documentary entertainment. The pacing is particularly immediate in a blooming rehearsal plot about motherhood—condensing the experience into a two-week simulation—and yet the intercutting also finds moments to let people reveal their colorful behavior, the kind of stuff they naturally reveal when Fielder’s camera puts them center stage. The editing is also a poignant tool in blurring our understanding of recreation and reality, encouraging us to not see either so literally.
For fans of “Nathan for You,” Fielder’s incredible Comedy Central series that introduced Dumb Starbucks, Summit Ice jackets, an unforgettable Bill Gates impersonator, and more, there is a familiar coziness to “The Rehearsal.” Fielder’s monotone voiceover kicks in at the beginning as if this were another episode of “Nathan for You,” and ends each episode with a reflection that is meaningful however bizarre in context. It’s not as cringe-ready funny as “Nathan For You,” and it gives a lot of sentimental space to beholding people making their own connections and revelations. But watching Skeet in the actual, do-or-die moment of confessing to Tricia is a special concoction of naked human psychology, and “The Rehearsal” plays it out almost in full.
Fielder’s commitment to a concept is even more intense here than “Nathan For You,” which was only initially about his kooky, attention-grabbing business ideas and the people who allow him to try them out. That show established him as a master of awkwardness, and therefore, because everyone is awkward, more or less a master of people. Now, he takes on an even more ambitious adventure with many unpredictable factors, including his subjects who become actors in their own stories. Beating reality seems like an impossible goal, but it is exhilarating, fascinating, and often very funny to see Fielder get closer and closer to it. [A-]
“The Rehearsal” debuts on HBO and HBO Max on July 15.