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.
But we are now three days away from the season (or series?) finale of The Rehearsal, and it is clear that Fielder is aiming for something much more profound than what he accomplished on his Comedy Central show. In the second episode, the audience is introduced to Angela, a wiggy, evangelical Christian woman, who seeks out Fielder's questionable expertise to prepare for a future where she raises a child.
At first, Angela appears to be the Monster of the Week, grist for the Fielder machine before he moves onto his next adversary. Instead, he concludes the episode by becoming Angela’s co-parent, which injects the author of all this anarchy directly into the simulation itself. The Rehearsal then mutates into a show starring a fake husband, a fake wife, and their fake son, navigating all of their fake problems to prepare for a possible timeline where these lives actually become real.
In the most recent episode, after a ridiculous cavalcade of escalations—including a phony drug overdose, a botched Christmas celebration, and most memorably, some fiery Judeo-Christian tensions—Angela decides she's had enough. She leaves the set after correctly concluding that The Rehearsal is a sham. Fielder, of course, sticks around, like a brokenhearted divorcee, yearning for a life he never actually had in the first place.
Everything we believed about the show a month ago has turned out to be false. In fact, I don't think anyone really understands what The Rehearsal is supposed to be, as we continue to spiral down into the inky blackness of Fielder's mind. We have exactly one episode left to figure it out.
Thus far, the only definitive judgment anyone can render about The Rehearsal is that it's uncomfortable, and that seems to be the point. It has been fascinating to watch the lengths Fielder will go to support his little pocket dimension; in the penultimate entry, Episode 5, he hires an HBO crew to douse the Oregon mansion housing Angela with snow, in order to better simulate how their Potemkin family dynamic would respond to the winter months. (Badly, as it turns out!)
But Fielder also breaks the immersion several times throughout the series, and it is those sequences where The Rehearsal comes off as sinister, rather than just unsteady and awkward. Towards the end of Episode 4, Fielder—who had just convinced Angela to allow him to transform their son into a dirtbag teen—asks her if he could de-age him back down to a toddler. Angela, in a deeply beleaguered tone, responds, “Whatever you think is needed for the show.” For the first time in the season, I had sympathy for her. The Rehearsal no longer felt like a bafflingly misguided attempt to prepare a few eccentrics for the frailty of reality. Instead, it was focusing on a woman who no longer wanted to be on a TV show. I'm not sure if that's brilliant character development, or good old-fashioned mean-spirited behavior.
Angela's arc is what sparked a conversation about Fielder's manipulative casting practices, that he intentionally seeks out oddballs to exploit on camera. There is probably some truth to those criticisms, although Angela did just conduct an interview on Facebook where she seemed, more or less, positive about her experience in the Fielder funhouse.
Honestly, one of the fascinating elements about The Rehearsal is how each episode seems to predict the roiling discourse it might inspire. In the fifth episode, Fielder brings in an Angela facsimile so he, himself, can practice for his own confrontation with her. Angela's actress lets him have it, soliloquizing in cutting detail about how all of Fielder's pop-psych jargon is laughably transparent and nakedly bad-faith; that she, and everyone else on set, is just here to be laughed at by HBO subscribers. She's right, of course, and for the first time in The Rehearsal, Fielder has nothing to say.
This is what makes Friday's conclusion the most anticipated episode of reality television since, I don't know, the end of Joe Millionaire? Colton hopping the fence? Fielder has exactly one opportunity to tie all of The Rehearsal's threads together and reveal his master plan. The cameras are all pointing at him now. Every week, Fielder's solipsism has creeped deeper toward the heart of the project, and now he's the last person left participating in the simulacrum.
There's a chance he sticks the landing, and Fielder coalesces so many of the questions hovering at the edge of the series—his guilt about taking advantage of other people's trust, his own failed marriage, the complexities of human interaction in a confusing and increasingly public-facing world—and The Rehearsal is remembered as a truly remarkable artifact. But there is also a chance that the series continues its beguiling journey into the absurd, as Fielder is unable or unwilling to muster the introspection necessary to thread the needle on all of these knotty themes. Regardless of what happens, I'll be watching The Rehearsal finale in my usual spot: coiled on the couch, hands over my eyes, bracing for impact.
