HBO
The Rehearsal’s formula seemed fairly straightforward in the premiere. Nathan Fielder—with his classically unnerving, Joker-ish verve—is posing as a terminally defective self-help coach. Anxious men and women would express their hang-ups about a job interview, or a marriage proposal, or a come-to-Jesus moment with a friend, and Fielder would attempt to balm those insecurities with a fully operational simulation of the anticipated situation.
In the opening scenes of the HBO series’ first episode, we learn that a man wants to tell a friend on his trivia team that he does not, in fact, possess the Master’s degree he said he did. Fielder responds by building a bar on a soundstage that’s designed to mirror the exact scenery of the anticipated confession, so that our patient can drill out the sticky chaos of human interaction over and over again until, for the first time in his life, everything feels under control.
The results were mostly dysfunctional, mildly revelatory, and definitely funny. In that sense, it brought to mind the psychedelic social experiments of Nathan For You, with a dramatic procedure that seemed easily replicable—like so many reality shows before it — so long as Fielder kept finding new marks.