Created by Nathan Fielder
Starring Nathan Fielder
Network: HBO Max and Binge
The incomparable Nathan Fielder is back with another brain-scramblingly inventive show, one that seems to question its own very existence. These six episodes are loads of fun to watch, for both their astonishing detail of the rehearsals themselves and what they reveal about the participants and Nathan, not to mention the particularly large emotional gut-punches that come along the way.
Nathan meets up with ordinary people and gives them the opportunity to rehearse an upcoming moment of their life that they feel needs practising. The first episode shows us this concept in its simplicity, where a nervous man wants to rehearse himself admitting the truth about his academic achievements to his friend. Such a confession may actually seem trivial (and it ultimately is), but it’s the process Nathan brings these people through that is so fascinating, amusing, and illuminating to be a spectator to.
The set designers of this show ought to be given the highest compliments, as they pain-stakingly recreate the environment these people will be in for their rehearsed moments (such as a bar in this case). Nathan fills these detailed recreations with extras, giving it all a big Synecdoche, New York feeling, making the most out of New York’s best improv actors.
This first episode is a fun and engaging exercise, but starting from the second episode we then have the narrative that continues on throughout the rest of the season involving Nathan, his fake wife, and his fake kid. As in Nathan’s other shows, Nathan for You and How To with John Wilson, he manages to find idiosyncratic people and place them in bizarre situations to find such incredible yet usual reactions from these real life people.
Some may find the existentialism, and the self-examination of filmmaking, in it preferable to his previous shows, however there does seem to be slightly less humour and well-crafted (or accidentally discovered) jokes. Nathan’s own examination of the workings of this show, particularly with the kid actors, comes through as massively emotional in the final episode. His methodology on the larger scale rehearsal is ambitious, yet the circumstances that arise tend to muddle it up as it goes along, until we reach a final moment where Nathan realises the kid-orientated wonder of playing make-believe.
Who knows how the show would have gone if there had been a through-line that could have been more adhered to, but this show’s first season (a second has just been green-lit) is an endlessly fascinating experimentation on both acting and reality.
DAVID MORGAN-BROWN
