A Very Long Essay on Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal
I went in DEEP about how despite trying to fight it, the beauty of life's unpredictability is celebrated in Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal
Let me put a disclaimer on today’s I’m Obsessed before I begin. I love Nathan Fielder. I’ve loved him since I started watching Nathan for You way back in the early 2010s when I saw a clip of his show on Tumblr and thought to myself “This man is weird but I dig his vibe.” That is the general consensus about Nathan Fielder for his fan base. He’s a silly little man doing silly little things.
On Nathan for You, he used his trademark awkward and deadpan persona to convince small business owners in Los Angeles to follow along an incredibly expensive and outlandish marketing plan with him (and by him I mean Comedy Central) footing the bill. While some plans were small in scale, say hiring a medium to team up with a real estate agent so she could sell certified ghost-free houses, some went viral. Nathan famously concocted the “Dumb Starbucks” parody in season 3 in which he built a replica Starbucks with the word “dumb” before all menu items and trademarked Starbucks items to establish it as a parody to avoid lawsuits. It was one of many marketing tactics that led both him and the show to be covered on the news worldwide.
Some episodes of Nathan for You however focused more so a story of humanity. One of the recurring characters in the series, a man who impersonated Bill Gates (though unconvincingly) confesses to Nathan in the series finale of the show that he had fallen in love with a woman decades ago but lost touch. Of course, Nathan steps in to help him find the woman as a friend in an hour-long rollercoaster that ends, well, rather sadly. Nathan and Fake Bill Gates are able to find the woman, but the woman no longer recalls who Fake Bill Gates is and refuses to see him.
Those human stories along with his own personal insecurities and anxieties are what led him to concoct the premise for The Rehearsal. “I’m not good at meeting people for the first time,” he opens in his voice-over for the first episode. “I’ve been told my personality can make people uncomfortable so I have to work to offset that.” What better way to offset that than by building a full-size replica of the area where the uncomfortable situation will take place and practice with actors hired to play everything from the person the situation is with to the people in the background of the immediate vicinity? He applies this technique to both his initially encounters with his subjects on the show and the subjects’ own problems.
The series starts out with a real intention to help people, with Nathan relating to his subjects: he helps a man named Kor in episode one confess the truth about a ten-year old lie about his education to a close friend. Nathan recreates an exact replica of the bar that Kor’s friends frequent and hires actors to play everyone from bartenders to pizza makers to background actors who are other patrons of the bar. But as the series progresses, Nathan begins to look inward as he gets more emotionally invested in the rehearsals. After meeting Angela, a Jesus-obsessed woman who wants a rehearsal to help her decide if she wants to have kids in episode 2, Nathan concocts a plan to have a variety of child actors from ages 1, 3, 9 and 15 to portray Angela’s fake son Adam while she lives in her ideal house for raising a child, a large farmstead in a secluded part of Oregon. When the man that Angela initially wants to raise Adam with backs out of the project, Nathan decides to step in to raise Adam with Angela to decide if he too wants to have kids in the future. This is exactly where The Rehearsal begins to dramatically shift in tone, interweaving the comedy of these carefully coordinated resolutions for real-life problems into a deep study of Nathan Fielder’s own psyche.
With Nathan as his own subject, the stakes are now much higher than what was presented in the first episode. In episode three when he notices that his subject Patrick can’t emotionally connect with the actor playing his brother to have a serious conversation, Nathan sees himself in the same situation with Adam back at the house in Oregon. It leads him to create the “Fielder method” acting school in Los Angeles where he encourages his students to find a “primary,” a random person who the actor learns to embody, going as far as getting them the same jobs as their primary and even setting up the same exact living situation as one of his student’s primary and having them live the same life. When he comes back to Oregon and realizes that he would’ve been gone nine years and that Adam is now a grown teenager, he immediately begins changing his approach, having Joshua, who plays Teenage Adam, talk to his friends who have dealt with their father’s abandonment. As Joshua relays to Nathan that he knows of a friend who ending turning to hard drugs because of his father’s abandonment, Nathan decides to rehearse exactly that.
The scenes escalate as Nathan actually tries to navigate this form of fatherhood, realizing how much work it actually is. He attempts to save face by buying gifts for Adam but it’s not enough. Angela and Nathan have an intervention with him after finding out on Adam’s Instagram (yes, the fake teenage son Adam has a fake Instagram) that he’s turned to hard drugs. By the time Adam nearly dies of an overdose and runs away during the last minutes, the audience gets so enthralled in Nathan’s performance as a dad and his dynamic with Adam that it feels like watching real life play out. Here, there is no longer a distinction between Nathan and his persona, it’s all his own volition. Even in the last scene when Nathan is standing in the playground where he finds Adam, it appears that the stress of it all has caused him to visually age. In the light of dawn, his hair looks grayer and his posture is slumped.
Nathan resets the rehearsal with Angela’s permission with a toddler at the end of episode four but by episode five, Nathan hits a real problem. Since Angela is a die-hard Christian, she refuses to budge when Nathan asks to raise Adam Jewish like he was. It especially bothers Nathan after his parents meet Angela and Adam, and his mother tells him “Sometimes you feel like it’s easier to just go along with things rather than, you know, deal with the tension,” something he already knows is a repeating theme with his previous relationships. Nathan sneaks around Angela and teaches Adam Judaism by hiring a Jewish teacher and going as far as teaching Adam in the basement of the house.
While the convoluted reality of the show isn’t lost on the viewer (Nathan pays millions of dollars to move his Alligator Lounge set from Brooklyn to Oregon where he opens it as a bar called “Nate’s Lizard Lounge” in order to keep his actors on HBO’s payroll in between their jobs on his set), that perfect reality of The Rehearsal is cracking, comparably to Truman discovering his life is a lie in the movie The Truman Show. Up until now, Nathan upholds his method of the rehearsals as the perfect plan to avoid the confrontation he hates, but he’s quickly learning that he can’t escape it. Even during rehearsals where he goes through scenarios with one of the most talented actors whose ever graced my screen playing Fake Angela, it gets to the point where Nathan is almost brought to tears.
“Do you want to feel something real?” Fake Angela asks Nathan in a heated argument.
“Yes,” Nathan replies, quivering his voice.
“That’s sad. You never will,” Fake Angela continues. “No matter how hard you try, you never will.” After a short silence where Nathan reflects on Fake Angela’s words, he quietly responds “Can we do that again but just a little bit nicer?”
The barrier that Nathan hides behind is being torn down and is only damaged more when Angela decides to leave the show, something that Nathan did not prepare for. He decides, however, to raise Adam as a single dad, throwing out all of Angela’s Christmas decorations and nailing a mezuzah to the front door frame.
Episode six begins with Nathan acting out his duties as a single dad, but the rehearsal loses its bulletproof protection once again when Remy, one of the 3-year old actors portraying Adam, throws a tantrum and refuses to leave the set. Remy, the kid that Nathan had the most scene chemistry with, grew attached to Nathan as a father figure because he has no dad. The first ten minutes of the episode are some of the most heart-breaking to watch with Nathan trying to explain to Remy “I’m not your daddy, I’m Nathan,” and Remy answering back “I don’t want you to be Nathan. I want you to be daddy.”
For Nathan, the events regarding Remy are the biggest pangs to his rehearsal. Emotionally, the audience can feel Remy’s innocent words hit Nathan like a cannonball. Nathan begins to emotionally disconnect to his rehearsal once again, undoing all of the strides he’s accomplished in the last few episodes. He revisits different scenes from the past: his conversation with Angela where she ends up leaving, and scenes where he really connected with Remy as Adam. For the latter, he uses teenage actors instead of child actors to see if being less emotionally attached would have prevented the current situation with Remy. It’s all fruitless and Nathan quickly realizes that he can’t figure out what he could have done differently.
With none of it adding up to him, he ultimately apologizes to Angela for squeezing her out of her own rehearsal, understanding why she left and why she felt so unprepared. She accepts his apology and amicably recites Matthew 18 from the Bible. She interprets the passage to Nathan and reminds him that if he’s going to apologize to her, he needs to learn how to forgive himself as well, something Nathan openly admits he struggles doing.
His path to self-forgiveness leads him back to Amber and he asks her how she convinces herself that Remy will be ok in the end.
“I didn’t convince myself,” she says. “I’m just gonna make sure he’s okay, so he is and I just know.”
“What did you see in his face that made you so sure?”
“Myself,” she answers. With that, Nathan goes on his most bizarre rehearsal yet, playing Amber throughout her entire journey in dealing with the show to assure himself that Remy will be ok.
With another child actor playing Fake Remy, he goes through filming Fake Remy’s casting call for Adam, their first day on set, their last day on set, and the aftermath. Despite the ridiculousness of the whole thing, it leads the audience to the most heart-felt moment and Nathan’s final epiphany during the last minutes of the season. As Nathan as Amber tries to cheer Fake Remy up, he breaks character. His convictions to Fake Remy that it will be ok don’t sound convincing because it feels like he’s not telling them to Fake Remy, he’s telling them to himself.
“I’m always going to be there for you,” he says. Then, he breaks out of the Amber character. “Because I’m your dad.”
The actor playing Fake Remy is confused. “Wait, I thought you were my mom.”
It is in that moment where Nathan is trying to find the right words to say that the audience sees him at his most vulnerable. His face gets red as his emotions swell into his eyes, making him tear up. In trying to portray other people to reassure himself that his methodology is working and that the entire project is going to help him and other people, the break in character comes through as the most sincere moment Nathan has on the show. He realizes perhaps that maybe the rehearsal doesn’t have to work exactly as planned. Life is never like that to begin with and his plans did not necessarily work perfectly for any of his subjects throughout the season.
During Kor’s final act in episode one, he goes off script and ends up missing his cue to confess the truth to his friend. He ends up doing it at his own pace rather than sticking to Nathan’s flow chart. In episode three, Patrick, the man who Nathan was helping, ends up ghosting Nathan right before his performance with Nathan surmising that “Perhaps the rehearsal is enough for some people.” Even Angela decides that the rehearsal is too much for her and leaves when she’s reached her limit. In the end, The Rehearsal proves its own thesis wrong. Nathan goes from planning out every last detail to ever so slightly being able to accept the impossibilities of life (I say ever so slightly because the show did get renewed for a second season), and especially parenthood. If anything, the show is a testament to that variability since things go so awry for Nathan and his subjects. Despite Nathan losing his mind, he finds his way out of it as elaborately as possible.
Nathan realizes within that last scene with Fake Remy exactly what Amber meant when she said that she knows Remy will be alright when she looks in her eyes. Nathan just has to make sure that for his own child, he will do whatever it takes to raise them right.
Nathan usually likes to wrap up all episodes of his shows with a summary of the morality he learned from the events of the episode. It’s part of his story-telling style that he’s carried since his days doing Nathan for You and even as a correspondent on Canada’s This Hour is 22 Minutes. There is no narration from Nathan during the last scene of The Rehearsal to close out the season, but none was needed. He would rather let the emotional weight of the scene itself, which he’s learned to expertly recreate through his acting throughout the last few episodes, carry us out for the season.
“No, I’m your dad,” Nathan finally responds, strong and convinced of himself. He hugs Fake Remy and the show cuts to credits.