I adored Nathan For You. I thought it was absolutely genius, so when I learned that Nathan Fielder was working on another comedy, I couldn't be more excited. This was probably my most hyped show of the year. But when the show started airing and people were talking about how screwed up it was, I immediately became worried about what I had gotten myself into. I decided to structure this review like one of the reaction posts I do for a Marvel or Star Wars show, because I know I'm going to have a lot to say about every single episode.
Orange Juice, No Pulp: The interesting thing about The Rehearsal's premiere is that it feels like a Nathan For You episode. It could've passed as one. It's a standalone story about Nathan trying to help someone out ala The Hero or Finding Frances, and the rehearsal gimmick really could've just been a weird one-off idea that Nathan had and would inexplicably work. The fact that it's the only 45-minute episode makes it feel all the more disjointed from the rest of the season. The fact that Orange Juice No Pulp felt so much like a NFY episode made it feel oddly comforting. It's like the show never left, although I found the premiere to be a lot less funny than most NFY episodes. It feels more like a drama, though an oddly wholesome one. While there are moments where you wonder if Nathan is crossing the line (especially that chilling ending, holy shit), the fact is that his plan worked and things ended up going really well for Kor, the episode's subject.
Scion: Scion is the first episode of The Rehearsal that feels genuinely different from Nathan For You. It feels like it could've and should've been the premiere of the show. Nathan's next subject is Angela, who he wants to help rehearse raising a kid, but nothing's really resolved by the end. For the first time in any Nathan show, The Rehearsal gets fully serialized. I get why Orange Juice, No Pulp exists though, and why it feels so disjointed from the rest of the series. It implies that Nathan (the character) tried to make a NFY-esque show but it ultimately derailed into something entirely different as he got attached to Angela's rehearsal. Maybe that's what happened behind the scenes too, like Nathan (the real person) and the crew were still figuring out what they wanted the show to be. I found Scion to be a slightly funnier episode than the premiere, since Angela and Robbin are both incredibly weird, though I also found it a bit more uncomfortable. Nothing topped that Pure Imagination scene from last episode, but having seen Nathan For You, the lack of resolution left me very unnerved.
Gold Digger: The Rehearsal continues to unnerve. I was surprised that Nathan actually started trying to multi-task, simultaneously tackling Angela's rehearsal and the rehearsal of an entirely new person, Patrick. It feels weird saying this about an actual person but I didn't really like Patrick, it was pretty hard to sympathize with him once the casual anti-semitism started. But even then, his breakdown and subsequent disappearance was still really hard to watch, especially since, once again, he's a real guy. I ended Gold Digger genuinely hoping that he's okay. Gold Digger also has yet another new storytelling technique for a Nathan Fielder show, a subplot. As mentioned above, Nathan is still trying to help out Angela, and once again the way he inserts himself into the rehearsal feels increasingly uncomfortable. Angela's ridiculous levels of Christianity also got put on the forefront and it's just so surreal seeing someone genuinely talk about how "Halloween is Satanic" and "Google is the devil". It's especially jarring considering how Angela has such a soft-spoken tone of voice. She could be having a perfectly casual conversation with Nathan only to drop some bizarre line that leaves me laughing with confusion.
The Fielder Method: This might be the most demented episode of television I've ever watched. For starters, there's just how ridiculously convoluted Nathan's plan ended up being here. It started as Nathan teaching a class of potential rehearsal actors and ended with him roleplaying one of his own students because they felt his tactics were unethical. While the show hinted at this topic for the first three episodes, it was interesting to see someone explicitly call Nathan's tactics unethical to his face only for him (the character) to double-down on them while simultaneously claiming that he "understands now". Once again, it feels like Nathan is starting to take over the show more and more, as if it's more about him than the "subjects". The Fielder Method pretty much entirely deals with Nathan (the character) struggling to show emotion and empathy, and as disjointed as it initially seems, Nathan acting out his "son" having a drug problem works as a coda to that. Putting that aside though, that whole "fake drug problem" bit just made me uncomfortable,
Apocalypto: This was probably my favorite episode of the show. At its simplest, Apocalypto is about the end of Angela's rehearsal. The whole episode deals with tensions between the two, particularly in regards to Angela's Christianity, but it was surprising to see how Nathan's fake confrontation with Angela and his real one. The actress for Fake Angela was fantastic and their fight obviously seemed to hit Nathan pretty hard, but the real thing ended up being really chill and Angela ended up leaving on a pretty amicable note. Nathan continuing the rehearsal though left me very scared, though. I found the religious stuff especially interesting. For starters, it made for the funniest episode of the show, between Nathan secretly teaching "Adam" Judaism and the whole Dr Fart debacle. But even more, I don't think I've ever related this much with Nathan. I'm culturally Jewish but not religious in the slightest, so a lot of his sentiments like "synagogue is boring" and "I only celebrate the holidays" are stuff that I just get on a personal level. I felt how uncomfortable he felt throughout the episode too, the show does an amazing job at illustrating how relentless casual antisemitism can be for people who are aware of it. There's a scene in the finale that was especially cruel about this.
But then there's Miriam and that final punchline, where someone who seems to be the voice of reason about Angela's antisemitism ends up being a hardcore zionist. I've seen so many responses to this scene calling it a betrayal from Miriam, with some even claiming Angela isn't that bad in retrospect (I can't even begin to express the problems with that). I don't agree with this reading at all. I know people like Miriam, I had her pegged as someone who would be totally pro-Israel right from the start. It's not a betrayal, and it's not a big political statement about the conflict either, it's a scene that hammers home the episode's main theme about religious nationalism. The scene is meant to strike a parallel between Miriam and Angela, not just in "my religion is superior" stuff but in the ridiculous conspiracy theories about Intel and, most of all, Miriam pushing her views onto an increasingly uncomfortable Nathan. Once again, I couldn't relate more to Nathan in this scene. The Israel/Palestine conflict is such a toxic hot-button issue, more than anything else, that I dread it being brought up. I genuinely spent an entire day panicking about how I worded this paragraph, it's that tense. And every time I talk to someone about it, they urge me to echo their sentiments, but my views on it are so nuanced that I would disappoint all of them. Nathan stammering and panicking the moment it got brought up was something I found very relatable. Maybe this is just my reading, but the whole scene and episode felt like a critique of religious nationalism and how uniquely toxic it can be.
Pretend Daddy: I have never wanted to know what went on behind the scenes of a show more than in The Rehearsal. I need to know if the people who participated in the show are okay (especially the kids), and how much of it was truly scripted. I'm especially unsure because of how perfectly Pretend Daddy pays off everything set up in Scion. The derailing of the show, Nathan getting attached to the project, the themes on the usage of child actors, it all leads to some pretty awful consequences here, and it makes for a truly uncomfortable episode. Basically, one of the child actors (named Remy) thinks Nathan is his actual dad, so he spends the rest of the episode trying to rehearse what he could've done to handle it only to conclude that the show was a mistake. His bizarre rehearsals in this episode did add a bit of levity, but what really pained me in Pretend Daddy was the fact that we don't really know how things turned out with Remy. Like Nathan could've possibly traumatized a kid, who leaves the show in the first five minutes of the episode. I wanted to care more about Nathan's plight and the resolution of his whole arc, but I spent the whole episode wondering "Why is Nathan goofing around right now? Is Remy going to be okay?". Pretend Daddy resolves a lot and feels like the perfect ending, but it left me feeling unsatisfied.
Most people seem to finish The Rehearsal thinking Nathan Fielder is either an absolute genius or an utter psychopath. Personally, I'm kinda leaning towards both. The fact that The Rehearsal, despite being unscripted and relatively impromptu, feels so thematically rich and cohesive is incredibly impressive. It feels a bit pretentious to just list out a bunch of themes The Rehearsal tackles, but I've seen readings of the show that claim it deals with parenthood, ethics, child acting, religion, overanalyzing social interactions, and empathy, and they all make total sense. For me, though, The Rehearsal is an utter mindfuck of a show that grapples with the ethics of Nathan's work and takes the reliably light-hearted antics of Nathan For You and distorts it, playing them in a far more serious light. It's able to fully and wholeheartedly deconstruct itself, literally an entire show about why its own premise a bad idea. And as someone who despises reality TV and thinks it's almost all unethical trash, I like that there's a show willing to echo that exact same sentiment.
However, I also can't say the show didn't make me immensely uncomfortable, between the way child actors were used, to the rehearsals that ended up falling apart. I think it's just that I'm not sure what's real and what isn't that truly concerned me. I'd like to hope that the worst of it was planned out and acted and that The Rehearsal never really harmed anyone, besides Nathan is fully aware of the ethical dilemma of his show's premise since he tackles it pretty much every episode. The show never really punches down either, Nathan seems to be poking more fun at himself than anyone else. But there's also the looming thought that the show did have real consequences that weren't just fabricated by the show, that Nathan could've truly traumatized a child, that Patrick is still MIA, that Angela saw her fake kid have a drug overdose. It's because of this that I'm not entirely sure how to rate The Rehearsal. I've never felt this conflicted about a show since FLCL, which makes sense since that was also a very one-of-a-kind series. It's a brilliant and thought-provoking piece of art with a ridiculous amount of possible readings, that also made me incredibly uncomfortable concerning how it was made. All I know is, I don't think I'll ever be the same after having watched this.
No rating
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