Just When You've Entirely Forgotten About It, Here's Some Thoughts On The Rehearsal
Hello everyone. I've been wanting to write about Nathan Fielder for quite some time, but a lot of things got in the way - I got shoulder surgery, then my grandmother died, then I got covid at her shiva, then I got surgery on the other shoulder, then I started a new job. So I hope you'll forgive me for this much-belated #take on Nathan Fielder and The Rehearsal, the last episode of which aired on HBO in mid-August.
I'd like to start by saying that I'm a huge fan of Nathan Fielder's work, so even though I plan to try to dissect The Rehearsal with a very critical lens, I couldn't do so if I weren't basically obsessed with this guy. I'm here to neither bury nor praise him. Instead, I'd like to look at The Rehearsal from a few different angles: as a reality show, as a self-critique, and as a magic trick.
Despite a few months of hilariously bad press, HBO still has a little bit of a patina of prestige. The slogan "It's not TV, it's HBO" helped create a brand identity that somehow, these TV shows were so much better than normal TV shows that they were something else entirely. This is, of course, bullshit, but it's been very effective marketing, and for a long time, a lot of HBO programming could be sold as "It's not [genre], it's HBO['s take on that genre]." Deadwood wasn't a Western - HBO is too good to make a Western. This is an HBO Western. The Wire wasn't a cop show - HBO is too good to make a cop show. This is an HBO cop show. Watchmen wasn't a superhero... you get the picture. In point of fact, much of HBO's programming can be best understood as examples of classic TV genres even if they'd have you believe otherwise. So I think we need to begin our understanding of The Rehearsal by seeing it as a[n HBO] reality show. It has that HBO gloss, but it is still functionally a reality show.
One of the great pleasures of reality television (and this was very well dramatized on the series UnReal) is the tension between producers and talent. For the most part, reality television isn't scripted in the sense that lines are written on a page by members of the Writer's Guild - it's closer to Curb Your Enthusiasm, where producers tell the talent what to do in a scene and the talent improvises dialogue to express it. Because the talent usually goes by their own name (e.g., Countess Luann), it can be easy to mistake what's happening for strict documentary (and of course even that's a gray area, just ask Nathan Fielder superfan Errol Morris about his work for Theranos). This is also why speculation about who's an actor and who's a "real person" is, in my view, misguided: it's reality television, which means everyone is an actor.
On The Rehearsal, like on Fielder's previous series Nathan for You, Nathan Fielder serves double duty as talent and producer (like Kris Jenner). This means that he can control the events of the series as a performer by forcing conflict, and as a producer, by creating the circumstances and of course in the editing process. Though The Rehearsal has been reasonably compared to the great movie Synecdoche, New York, just about everywhere, I think there's another movie that bears a better comparison: Albert Brook's debut Real Life.
In 1973, PBS aired An American Family, a documentary series sometimes called the first reality show. The intention was to document the real drama of a normal American family. During the course of the show, teenage son Lance Loud came out as gay and mother Pat kicked philandering father Bill out of the house. The subjects of the documentary, the Louds, and many viewers, critiqued the way the show created drama - in the editing process as well as the way the presence of cameras can push real people to perform. Albert Brooks's Real Life, released in 1979, escalated these critiques by having Albert Brooks play himself documenting an American family (made up of actors including Charles Grodin) orchestrating dramatic situations and ultimately deliberately burning down the family's house.
There's one particular scene in the second episode of The Rehearsal that I think best demonstrates a kinship with Real Life (not to be confused with real life, of course). In episode two, Nathan has created a large family home in rural Oregon for Angela, a woman who wants to "rehearse" raising a child from infancy to adolescence. After a handful of dates, fellow Christian conspiracy obsessive Robbin agrees to move in with Angela and coparent for the rehearsal. When Robbin runs home to pick up some stuff before his first night caring for a crying robot baby, Nathan observes him making a series of absolutely absurd choices on camera, including distracted driving under the influence and almost getting into a physical fight with his roommate. They return to Angela's house where Robbin agrees to take on full caring responsibilities for the night.
We watch from Nathan's control room. We learned previously that there is a camera set on an actual sleeping baby and a self-proclaimed night owl has been hired to watch the baby sleep and make the robot baby cry exactly when the real baby cries, to best simulate real parenting. This night watchman falls asleep on the job twice, so now Nathan must join him in the control room. We don't see the actual sleeping baby, but we do see Nathan directing the night watchman to make the robot baby cry again and again and again, until Robbin has been pushed past his limits and decides to check out in the middle of the night. By the end of the episode, Nathan has offered himself as a coparent, and by the end of the season he is the exclusive parent. While each of these events makes rough sense, we're also directed to view some of Fielder's manipulations (e.g., the uncomfortable moment when he asks Angela if he can co-parent on camera in a fake bar that he had built in Brooklyn and then moved to a warehouse in Oregon) and shielded from others: Was the robot baby crying parallel to the real baby, or was Nathan deliberately pushing Robbin, a wildly irresponsible man, to leave so he could step in and move toward the show's intended narrative arc? Nathan ended up in the control room because the man he hired kept falling asleep. According to the show.
In the show's first episode, Nathan opens up a bit to a man named Kor, in a swimming pool. Kor is divorced, and Nathan mentions that he too is divorced. Before he can discuss further, their conversation is interrupted by a stranger swimming past. In voiceover, Fielder explains that this "stranger" was in fact an actor hired specifically to interrupt the discussion and allow Nathan not to have to get more personal than he'd be comfortable with. The character of Nathan is famously reticent to discuss his personal life, as is Nathan Fielder the public figure (though Nathan Fielder's public persona is often an extension of his character of Nathan). But Nathan Fielder is also the one who orchestrated this entire scenario - he didn't need to bring up his divorce at all. And I do think, as an obsessive fan, it's interesting that the personal detail he shares happens to be one of the very few personal details that he's already mentioned publicly, giving no new information. This is the key to effective reality television production: creating the illusion of full transparency.
There's another useful point of comparison here outside of reality TV, and that's the classic children's cartoon The Magic School Bus (I'm discussing the show's original run but most of this is true for the reboot as well). On this show, as we all know, a class of elementary students follow their teacher Ms. Frizzle on impossible field trips: into outer space, or a classmate's internal organs, or a world without friction, to name three. At the end of each episode, there's an animated segment where a "viewer" calls the show's "producer" (voiced by either Malcolm Jamal-Warner or Susan Blu) and points out elements from the show that are incorrect (e.g., a process that typically takes weeks is shown taking mere minutes). The producer always agrees that the viewer is correct, and explains that for production and entertainment reasons, the show must fudge a few things.
These segments build trust for the real-life viewers. We know we're learning real science through the show, and also that things that are incorrect will be covered at the end to clarify what's TV magic and what's real. But here's the thing: these segments are also part of the show. They're scripted by the same people who write the show, and they suggest that the show's producers share a real universe with Liz, the anthropomorphic chameleon who goes on adventures with the class. We are treated to elements of unreality in a segment designed to differentiate between what's real and what isn't.
None of which is to say that The Magic School Bus is intentionally misleading viewers - it's a charming show and I assume they work hard to be clear and accurate about science. But the reality/unreality of these segments bears some similarity with what we see on The Rehearsal. In the latter's fourth episode The Fielder Method, Nathan decides to age down his and Angela's fake son Adam. At the end of the episode, a teenaged actor playing Adam enters a tube slide and a small child actor exist the slide at the other end. As Nathan walks away with the small child, the teenager reëmerges from the top of the slide, looks at the camera and asks, "Is that it?" We're expected to understand this behavior as his own, independent of the designed, rehearsed, and performed bit of business in the slide - but why should we take the show's word for it? This moment is part of the same show we see misleading us in myriad ways.
The Rehearsal is full of critiques of Nathan himself, the series, reality television, and the use of child actors. Perhaps one of the cutest moments of these critiques comes in the series finale, when Nathan Fielder is playing the mother of a child actor, watching the child actor interact with an actor playing Nathan Fielder. A production assistant (or an actor playing a production assistant?) turns to Nathan-as-mother and says of Nathan Fielder (being played by an actor), "He's kind of a weird dude, huh?" Certainly.
There are other moments when Nathan faces criticism - two in particular are especially interesting. At the end of the first episode, Nathan confesses the deceptions he's perpetrated to help Kor complete his narrative arc. The show then reveals that he's been confessing to an actor playing Kor, who lays into him, castigating him for his lies. The show suggests that this experience discourages Nathan from being honest with the real Kor, but it never suggests that this criticism is unfair. In the fifth episode, Apocalypto, Nathan has been facing several conflicts with Angela, and rehearses a confrontation with her through an actor playing her. She pushes back against Nathan's insistence that Angela take The Rehearsal seriously, and interrogates Nathan's motives and his relationship with Angela: "Is my life the joke?" asks Fake Angela. Again, it's difficult to feel that she's being unfair. But it's also important to remember that not only did Fielder organize these conflicts in the first place, but he's also being yelled at by actors that he hired, while asking the audience to believe that he's unprepared for what they have to say.
Similarly, the season's finale episode Pretend Daddy deals extensively with small children struggling to differentiate between their acting relationship with Nathan and their real-life relationship with Fielder. It's entirely accurate that small children struggle to understand the difference between fantasy and reality, or scripted television and documentary - it's also demonstrably accurate that adults can't always tell the difference between scripted television and documentary, when one exists.
This conflict is introduced in the episode by a parent telling Nathan that his providing a Jewish education for his fake child has created confusion in their Christian home. In a classic bit, Nathan sits down with the child to say that Judaism is pretend and Christianity is real, and the child will go to Heaven while Nathan will go to Hell. It's the kind of reductio ad absurdum that Nathan Fielder is best at, and the parent somewhat uncomfortably agrees that Nathan is going to Hell for being Jewish.
There are in fact many conflicts over Nathan's Judaism in this series and they bear examination. The first episode, dealing with Kor and pub trivia, is set in Brooklyn. In the fourth episode, Nathan starts an acting school in Los Angeles. But the rest of the show takes place in rural Oregon, with a woman named Angela who is casually antisemitic - and including a brief detour with another local man, Patrick, who is also casually antisemitic. Fielder invites his real parents to visit his fake family, and they pressure him to raise his fake child Jewish. Soon, in one of the show's iconic visuals, the holiday season approaches in the form of fake snow covering the house and yard but nothing else, and Nathan and Angela have the first of a series of fights over their fake child's religious upbringing.
Nathan Fielder, the show's star, writer, director, and producer, appears to be back on his heels during all these conflicts. He's a lonely Jew in a world populated by antisemites; he finally connects with another Jew only to learn that she's an obnoxious Israel hawk. And while there's a great deal to be said about the lives of Jews in areas with small Jewish populations, all of these conflicts were created by Nathan himself. He brought the show to Oregon; he chose to focus on Angela, a woman who's in no way shy about her beliefs; he invited his parents to view his fake parenting; he created fake winter. When he and Angela actually do fight, he's not just contributing to the conflict as a participant; he's personally responsible for every detail of the world in which their conflict takes place. What makes Angela such a compelling figure is her complete understanding of and discomfort with this dynamic.
So let's look at Nathan Fielder as something other than a writer-director-producer-performer-reality star. He's also a magician; magic tricks made occasional appearances in Nathan for You, especially in the first season finale and the series finale. There's a term sleight of hand artists use, "closing doors." It refers to showing an audience some ways that the magician is not doing the trick. When we watch the trick, we're looking for explanations for how its done, and a magician closes doors by ruling out possibilities (e.g., nothing up my sleeve, or tapping rings together to show they're solid). This has the effect of growing our wonder at the trick. It also means that the more magicians show us about a trick, the less we understand of it.
So when we reach the heart-breaking episode Pretend Daddy, we meet a child desperate for a father who's become attached to Nathan because he (the child) can't understand what it means to be acting as someone's child. Nathan struggles to help the child understand reality, and to himself understand what mistakes he made that led to this moment, but we're ultimately left in ambiguous unsatisfying space. Nathan Fielder employed child actors in his program and cannot undo that mistake.
By this point Nathan has closed many doors for us. He showed us the process of casting a fake family, of creating December for this one house in Oregon, of his own need to connect and inability to do so outside of his television production. We've also, though, seen him set up a house in isolation in a way that specifically creates sympathy for him as a lonely Jew. We see him push away competitors for the household father figure. We see him help pretend to raise a child to his teens, then decide to start over with a small child right before the season ends. We see him force conflicts that ultimately lead to Angela bowing out of participation. So the moral conflict at the end is impossible without a series of choices that lead to Nathan, alone, pretending to raise a small child in this house.
Everyone involved has signed NDAs and a magician like Nathan would never reveal his tricks - he's also not under any obligation to tell the truth when he DOES offer insights. Any analysis of the show is necessarily incomplete except, perhaps, quoting the late Amazing Randi: “Magicians are the most honest people in the world: They tell you they’re going to fool you, and then they do it.”
SCREEN TIME: SOME THOUGHTS ON AND RECOMMENDATIONS OF CHILDREN'S MEDIA
As you know, a lot of content left HBO Max recently, including many seasons of Sesame Street. To my knowledge, those episodes are not available elsewhere, and it's an absolute shame. Old episodes of Sesame Street are not only fun and educational, they also tell an important story about the evolution of children's media in the United States. As I've mentioned before, I think Buffy Sainte-Marie's arc on the show is so interesting. Now entirely gone from HBO Max.
WHAT'S NEW ON GH LATELY
Nelle came back!!!!!! Nelle was a rising villain when I started watching General Hospital and I still think she's fantastic. She's so vicious and brutal and single-minded, but she truly thinks eventually everything will work out and she'll be a respected member of society. We last saw her falling off a cliff to her death (her body was apparently recovered "on the Pennsylvania side of the river") but she came back as a ghost verrrrrry briefly last week. It's my hope that she turns out to be alive, especially now that we know that she has a twin sister who's sick. When Nelle is about, chaos reigns.
Also, I started watching Days of Our Lives on Peacock. I can't say what's new because I don't know anything about the show and won't until I've watched every single day for years. But I do really appreciate how many sex scenes the show has compared to the pretty chaste General Hospital.
TAGS
This broadcast's theme song is the title theme from the series Naked City. I've been thinking a lot lately about the sounds of cop shows, and why they're scored the way they are. Possibly more to come on this in a different format.
As I said last time, I have a thing based on interviews coming soon, and I'm also working on a thing comparing a Quibi series to a somewhat famous text. Plus some other things. If there's ever anything you want to hear about, please let me know!
I read a thing about new shows coming this fall and like everyone's betting big on Westerns, including a Walker Texas Ranger prequel set in the 19th century, and like sixty more Taylor Sheridan things. I wonder if we'll, like, run out of filming locations. I also am curious if we'll surpass the number of Westerns on the air at their height like sixty years ago.
I'm very curious to see how Amazon's FreeVee does - the only streaming platform to have twice changed names faster than HBO's. Are we going to reach a point where every major streamer has their primary platform (e.g., Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Disney+, Paramount+, etc), one non-time-shifting cable thingy (e.g., Pluto TV, Peacock's "Channels") and one ad-supported on-demand platform (like FreeVee or Pluto TV's On Demand option)? Because that would be pretty funny.
"'Take care of yourself and each other.' - Jerry Springer" - Harry Waksberg