Series / The Rehearsal

Why leave life to chance?

"Everything that's happened so far today — I've rehearsed it dozens of times, these exact words, in a replica of your home, with an actor playing you..."

—Nathan

The Rehearsal is a docu-reality comedy television series created by and starring Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder. Ostensibly, the series follows Fielder as he helps people prepare for major life events by allowing them to rehearse with the assistance of elaborate sets and an army of actors hired to play their friends and family members. Fielder is well-meaning but extremely awkward, leading to many Cringe Comedy moments. After one episode, though, things quickly go off the rails, and the series becomes something else entirely. It's kind of hard to explain without seeing, but the barriers between reality and fantasy deteriorate to the point it's no longer certain if Fielder is even in control of his own show anymore.

It's something of a Creator-Driven Successor to Fielder’s previous series Nathan for You, another docuseries in which he tried to help small businesses through unconventional methods, only to have his awkwardness lead to countless moments of Cringe Comedy. The first, six-episode season aired on HBO on July 15, 2022. It has been renewed for a second season.

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Tropes:

• Absurd Phobia: One of the men Angela goes on a date with says that his biggest fear in life is eels.
• Acting for Two: In-Universe, Nathan has some actors play multiple characters in rehearsals.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: In-Universe, Nathan and Kor have differing interpretations of Willy Wonka. Kor sees Wonka as a philanthropist who changes people’s lives for the better, while Nathan sees him as a villainous child murderer.
• Ambiguous Situation: As Nathan begins to incorporate himself more and more into the rehearsals, it becomes less clear to the audience whether Fielder is just leaning further into his own reality-bending shtick or whether he's actually begun to lose sight of what's real and what isn't. The ambiguity of whether his breakdown in Episode 4 is Fielder acting or experiencing a genuine emotional response to a traumatic roleplay scenario only casts further into doubt how much of what we're seeing is "real."
• Anti-Hero: Nathan constantly manipulates everyone around him, albeit usually for a good cause. As the series goes on it becomes less clear how altruistic his motivations actually are or whether he's come to see the rehearsals as an elaborate form of therapy for himself.
• Arc Words: "OK."
• As Himself: As in Nathan for You, Nathan plays an exaggerated version of himself.
  • One of the unique conceits of the show is that, as the series goes on, the line between the Nathan character- which has always been a burlesque of Nathan Fielder- and the real man begins to blur, to the point it's impossible to tell if Fielder is just leaning even further into his own shtick or if he's suffering some kind of real-life breakdown on camera.
• The Atoner: In the season finale, Nathan tries to make up for accidentally convincing Remy that he is his father. He spends the episode trying to understand what he could’ve done differently and explain to him that he was just his pretend daddy.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The rehearsals themselves. While they are very interesting and help people prepare for their lives, most episodes show that they don’t really help people with their problems much and are overly complex, requiring too many resources to be practical.
• Bait-and-Switch: One of the conventions of the series-
  • In a scene near the end of the first episode, Nathan is seemingly admitting that he tricked Kor into cheating, only to show that he is actually talking to fake Kor in a rehearsal.
  • In "Pretend Daddy," Nathan brings Liam to play with Remy after convincing him he's not his new dad and seems to flirt with Remy's mom, implying Nathan be considering becoming a part of the boy's life, especially after he looks back on their good rapport. It turns out that Nathan just wanted to help Liam study Remy to better portray him in a rehearsal.
    • "Did you get what you need?"
    • Also noteworthy is that Nathan's "flirting" consists of asking where Remy's mom got her coat from with genuine interest, and telling her it looks nice. In the next scene, he's wearing the exact same coat
• Big Ego, Hidden Depths: Angela spends most of her screentime judging Nathan and claiming to know the "truth" about how the world operates, and generally looks down her nose at anyone who doesn't share her very specific and strange beliefs. In "Pretend Daddy," though, she not only quickly forgives Nathan for hijacking her own rehearsal, she also intuits that a lot of his problems stem from personal turmoil and encourages him to forgive himself, telling him that even if we forgive other people, self-forgiveness is an often overlooked part of the healing process.
• Black Comedy: While mainly a Cringe Comedy, the show has its fair share of dark humor.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Although his plans and over-preparedness seem absurd, Nathan's plans are often helpful and end up improving people's lives.
• Call-Back: To Fielder's previous work, Nathan for You. Nathan often wears his Summit Ice jacket, which was a brand he created for the show.
• The Chessmaster: Nathan uses his rehearsals to manipulate situations to the best outcome through extreme planning and practice.
• Cloudcuckoolander:
  • Most of the people in the show are rather strange, but Robbin stands out. He has an extreme obsession with numerology and finds arbitrary significance in every number he sees, randomly brings up crashing his Scion all the time, hates his roommate for not believing in Jesus, thinks non-Christians are all possessed by demons, drives while high, tries to solicit sex from an unmarried woman who explicitly said that they're waiting for marriage, and doesn’t have a license plate. He lacks any self awareness and thinks all of these things are normal. This trope became more enforced when his relatives on social media confirmed that his actions were unscripted and he's actually that cracked in real life.
    • Robbin didn't do himself any favors going to Vice to "clear the air" for an interview that just made him seem more unhinged than he did on the show. Among other admissions, he clarifies that he crashed the aforementioned Scion during an illegal street race while high and drunk (the same afternoon he got fired for drinking on the job), and complains that the producers cut out all the parts of his appearance in which he compared himself to Jesus. He also claims he believed Nathan Fielder wanted to murder him for being Christian.
  • The "night owl" Nathan hires to control the robot baby falls asleep within fifteen minutes of starting his job and believes in conspiracy theories about the government hiding Bigfoot’s existence.
  • Angela has many unusual beliefs, stemming from her fundamentalist religious views. For instance, she thinks Halloween is a satanist holiday and that Google is hiding the truth due to being run by satanists. She is shocked that Nathan has never heard of this and treats it as common knowledge.
• Continuity Nod: The bar Nathan has built in the pilot keeps popping back up in the series in increasingly strange yet incidental ways. Nathan first has the entire set flown across country and reassembled in a warehouse next to his office just so he can hang out there. Later, he actually opens it as a full-service bar and hires his acting students to work there, building a storefront facade connected to an extended tunnel leading from the street into the warehouse to lure in unsuspecting passerby.
  • The actors from Nathan’s acting class in episode 4 pop up in various roles in the remaining episodes.
• Control Freak: Nathan obsessively controls every single detail of his rehearsals.
• Crazy-Prepared: The entire point of the show. Nathan over-prepares for any situation through intricate and detailed rehearsals.
• Cringe Comedy: As to be expected, like his previous work, Nathan’s awkward personality leads to many cringey moments throughout the series. His rehearsals and plans often put the guests in uncomfortable situations.
• Culturally Religious: Nathan hasn't attended synagogue in years and isn't very religious, but he celebrates Jewish holidays and considers himself Jewish.
• Dark and Troubled Past: A recurring theme on the show:
  • Angela grew up in an abusive household and began abusing drugs and alcohol as a teenager, which explains why after getting sober she turned to religious fundamentalism later in her life.
  • Nathan himself admits to having been through a painful divorce in the first episode, and a big part of Episode 5 revolves around him realizing he still has unresolved issues and trauma relating not only to that breakup but all his previous failed relationships.
    • After returning from a business trip and realizing that in "rehearsal time" he's been gone for nine years, Nathan inflicts this trope on himself, asking the actor playing "Adam" to act as though he's a deadbeat dad who abandoned his family.
  • Robbin spends much of his screen time casually talking about his own troubled past, including how he survived wrecking a Scion driving 100mph.
  • Patrick had a falling out with his brother following the death of their grandfather because Patrick's brother won't allow him to have his portion of the inheritance on the grounds that all of Patrick's girlfriends are "gold diggers." As a result, the two brothers have been at odds for some time, and Patrick hasn't been able to grieve his grandfather's death because the focus has solely been on the will. After Patrick disappears and seemingly no longer needs to participate in the rehearsal, Nathan speculates that grieving the "death" of the actor playing his friend helped him work through his issues.
  • Subverted with Kor, who tells Nathan he has to confess a dark secret to his friend, Tricia. It turns out the "secret" is that he impulsively lied about having a masters' degree during a trivia game ten years ago, when in fact he only has a bachelor's degree. When he finally admits it, Tricia doesn't care.
• Deadpan Snarker: Liam in "Pretend Daddy."
  • "You're a great scene partner."
• Deuteragonist: Angela is the secondary main character of episodes 2-5 of the six episode first season, being the primary focus of episode two and equal screen time given to her rehearsal and whatever else Nathan is doing in episodes 3-5.
• Dramedy: While primarily a comedy, the series treats people's struggles sympathetically, and the denouements usually feature a voiceover from Nathan sympathetically observing something about human nature, be it the need for honesty in a friendship or the necessity of grieving.
• Foreshadowing: In first episode, Nathan states that one could easily get lost in the rehearsals. Throughout the season, he finds himself lost in the rehearsals himself, confusing them with reality.
• The Fundamentalist: Several pop up.
  • Angela is convinced that Halloween is Satanic and believes in a variety of Christian conspiracy theories, and quotes Bible verses as responses to conflict.
  • Robbin is perhaps the most extreme example on the show, finding religious numerological significance in everything he encounters, believing that non-Christians are all possessed by demons, and not wanting to even associate with non-Christians. In an interview with Vice magazine after his episode aired he doubled down on this by claiming that Nathan Fielder wanted to murder him for his beliefs and admitted he compares himself to Jesus.
  • A rare Jewish fundamentalist appears in the form of Miriam, who is staunchly pro-Israel. Rather than end with a song as usual, the credits for Episode 5 play over an extended rant by Miriam in which she extols several pro-Israel talking points.
  • In "Pretend Daddy", the mother of one of the "Adam" actors forces Nathan to impugn Judaism after having spoken of it positively to her son, down to telling the boy that Jews will burn in Hell for not believing in Jesus.
• Genre Deconstruction: Of reality TV and "unscripted" television. The series takes the whole idea of an "unscripted TV show" and twists it heavily, being an unscripted TV show about scripting a series of events. Nathan and his obsession with perfect rehearsals quickly get out of hand, as the subjects and eventually Nathan himself get twisted up in the series of events transpiring. It quickly becomes difficult to tell what is and is not scripted, especially in the Angela episodes. As a result, the series has somewhat of a Surreal Horror edge to it under the Cringe Comedy, as both Nathan and the audience become unsure of what is and is not real. At the very end of the series, Nathan seems to slip fully into the delusion of what the rehearsals can give him and embraces his fake role as a father over his real one as an actor. The idea seems to be that unscripted reality television has the dangerous ability to delude both the audience and the producers into believing that the events are really happening, which can have an effect on the mental health of those involved.
• The Ghost: Patrick's girlfriend Nessa drives the plot of episode 3, being the titular gold digger, yet we never see her on screen. Similarly, we never see Patrick's real brother, only the actor playing him.
• Gold Digger: Patrick's brother is convinced that the Patrick's girlfriend is a gold digger, leading to the central conflict of the episode.
• Greedy Jew: Invoked by Patrick, who makes the antisemitic claim that someone is "like a Jew" with their money, leading to Nathan being offended.
• Halfway Plot Switch: Several, to the point that it becomes one of the conventions of the show.
  • The series is initially presented as an episodic hidden camera comedy show in the same vein as Nathan for You, with Fielder helping a new person each week prepare for a life event they've been putting off.In episode 2, he immediately decides to become part of his own experiment when Angela is unable to find a suitable partner for her rehearsal. The show then takes on a serialized format following the pair living together in a rental home and roleplaying as parents to a series of child actors for six weeks. And although the tone remains comedic, it often plays more as a Dramedy.
  • Episode three is ostensibly about Patrick rehearsing to confront his brother about the stipulations of their grandfather's will. Nathan instead manipulates an unknowing Patrick into a rehearsal meant to force him to confront his feelings about his grandfather's death by arranging for him to befriend an elderly man who's really an actor, and then informing Patrick the man has died. For whatever reason, the experience leads Patrick to quit the show and he never completes the rehearsal or confronts his brother on-screen.
  • In episode four, Nathan comes home from a three-week trip to find that "Adam," he and Angela's "son," is now a teenager, and he struggles with the implications of a man abandoning his family for nine years. After staging a drug overdose so that he can justify "de-aging" Adam back to six, Nathan dedicates himself full-time to Angela's rehearsal.
  • Much of episode six involves Nathan trying to repair the damage he caused to child actor Remy by accidentally making the fatherless child believe he was his new dad. Par for the course, Nathan enlists another child actor, Liam, to play Remy so that Nathan can rehearse what he could've done better; but then Nathan decides he needs to see the situation from Remy's mother's perspective and begins roleplaying as her, leading to the Wham Line that ends the season when Nathan loses track of who he's supposed to be playing.
• Historical Villain Upgrade: In Universe, the fake versions of real people Nathan uses in rehearsals are often worse than the real people they are portraying.
  • Fake Tricia reacts with severe anger at Kor for lying about his degree, ending their friendship forever. The real Tricia is very understanding and empathetic toward Kor.
  • Fake Kor feels betrayed and gives a "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Nathan after he admits he tricked him into cheating, calling him an awful person and claiming he ruined everything. While we never saw the real Kor's reaction, he and Nathan are on good terms in real life, so he was not as hostile as his fake counterpart.
  • Fake Angela gives a brutal "The Reason You Suck" Speech to Nathan in a rehearsal and told him no one could ever love him. When replicating the situation in real life, Angela acted maturely and thanked Nathan for giving her the opportunity to participate in the rehearsals.
• Holier Than Thou:
  • Robbin hates his roommate for not believing in Jesus. Exaggerated after Robbin himself flat out celebrated his former roommate's death on social media. He later claimed that Nathan (who is Jewish) wanted to kill him for being Christian.
  • Angela subscribes to numerous fringe Christian conspiracy theories and ideologies that place her and those who share her beliefs on a moral high ground.
• Left Hanging: Patrick's storyline involving his grandfather's will and relationship with his brother. While Patrick has a pretty emotional breakthrough after the "death" of the actor playing his new friend, he doesn't show up the following day. He initially tells Nathan he went to a carnival to have funnel cake with his girlfriend and invites Nathan to come, but when Nathan arrives he realizes he's been stood up. Nathan never hears from Patrick again and is left to speculate that maybe the catharsis he experienced in his rehearsal was what he really needed.
• Manchild: Angela is rather immature and childlike and is constantly playing around during her free time; two episodes feature clips of her dancing alone in her office when she's meant to be taking care of Adam. Nathan even questions whether she really wants to prepare for motherhood or if she's just using the show as an opportunity to get a free vacation.
• Method Acting:invoked "The Fielder Method" is an intense form of method acting taught by Nathan in his acting class, in which actors basically stalk the people they are impersonating and replicate their lives to perfectly act as that person and embody them.
• Mind Screw: The rehearsals become ever more confusing as the show continues, taking on a rehearsals-within-rehearsals nesting doll structure. For example, episode 4 finds Nathan teaching an acting class and growing uncertain how effective his methods are for one particular student. So Nathan hires actors to play his class and takes on the role of the student in question, with an actor playing Nathan teaching the same lessons he teaches his class. Meanwhile, Nathan instructs his student to get a job at a juice bar to understand a role he's playing; within the confines of the classroom rehearsal, Nathan- playing the student- himself gets a job in a juice bar to understand his student's experience. Nathan then manipulates the student into moving into a new apartment with actors playing roommates so that he can move in himself to better understand his life; but, because Nathan made the student move, Nathan- in his role as the student- is himself then forced to move to the same new apartment, which now contains actors playing actors playing roommates.
  • Invoked in "Pretend Daddy," in which Nathan learns one of the child actors used in an earlier episode of the show has come to regard him as his father, since the boy's biological dad isn't around in real life. Nathan spends much of the episode working with the boy's mother to help him realize he was just participating in a roleplaying scenario.
    • Taken up to eleven in the episode's final moments, when Nathan loses track of what role he's supposed to be playing himself. "No... I'm your dad."
• The Mirror Shows Your True Self: Subverted- comically so- with the mirrors in Angela's house. In order to enhance the illusion of time passing rapidly, Nathan has special mirrors installed that digitally alter his appearance to make him appear the age he "should" be if three years were passing for every lived week.
• Mood Whiplash: The show constantly shifts from serious to humorous, even within the same scene.
  • In a case of Real Life Writes the Plot, Episode 6 takes on a darker tone than the previous episodes when Nathan learns one of the child actors- who comes from a single-parent household- has come to believe Nathan is his new dad, and is genuinely traumatized by the experience. The numerous scenes of a crying child coupled with a visibly shaken Nathan trying to explain to him he was just participating in a TV show are much harder to watch than Nathan hoodwinking adult participants who knew what they were getting into.
• Motor Mouth: Kor's friend, Tricia, who talks constantly, usually to complain about her day. When she meets with an actress playing a bird watcher, ostensibly to conduct an interview, Tricia begins by talking about herself and doesn't begin conducting the interview for several minutes. The actress notes that it's enough of a defining part of Tricia's personality that she heavily incorporates it into her performance, leading Nathan and Kor to strategize how to keep her quiet long enough for Kor to make his confession. They eventually decide on [[spoiler: ordering a pizza, reasoning that the only time Tricia is guaranteed not to talk is when she's eating.
• Numerological Motif: Robbin is obsessed with numerology to the extent he tries to find deeper, cosmic significance in every number he encounters, from license plates to addresses.
• Ordered to Cheat: While Kor wasn’t exactly ordered to cheat, he was forced into it by Nathan against his will. Knowing that Kor would be unwilling to cheat at trivia, Nathan uses actors to secretly feed him information that will give him answers in the competition.
• The Other Darrin: In-Universe, Adam is played by a large number of child actors due to child labor laws and to make him age quickly.
• Parental Abandonment: Nathan returns from a business trip in Episode 4 and realizes that, in the storyline of the rehearsal, nine years have passed, meaning he technically abandoned Adam and Angela. The rest of the episode focuses on Nathan dealing with the implications of this, and he workshops a new interpretation of the Adam character with the teen actor playing him to make his performance more in line with that of a troubled teen who grew up without a father.
• Pet the Dog: Despite her shaky relationship with Nathan, Angela acts very respectfully and even kindly when deciding to quit the show, even thanking him for giving her this opportunity. In the finale, she quickly forgives Nathan for putting her in a difficult situation after he apologizes.
• Platonic Co-Parenting: After Angela cannot find a suitable man to raise her son with, Nathan decides to step in as a co-parent, at least until Angela leaves the rehearsals and he continues raising Adam alone.
• Psychological Horror: The weirdness and surreal nature of Nathan's rehearsals cause the show to veer into horror territory, especially when Nathan begins staging ghoulish situations like deaths and drug overdoses without the participants' prior knowledge, or casually manipulating participants into interacting with people they don't know are actors.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Two, both directed at Nathan, and with one seemingly orchestrated by Nathan himself.
  • In the first episode, Fake Kor rips into Nathan after he admits to having engineered his winning night at trivia, telling him he's ruined the best night of his life and that he's an awful person for it.
  • In Episode 5, Fake Angela delivers a brutal takedown of Nathan in a rehearsal. Notably, unlike with Fake Kor's takedown, Fielder appears to break character and ask if they can replay the scene with a more positive outcome.
    Fake Angela: "Nathan! What family life? You know we’re not your real family, right? This is your work. All of this. So, is this silly? Or is this something that I should take seriously? Why are you here? Why are you doing this? Are you really trying to help me? Or am I the silly part that you talk about? Is my life the joke? Do you sit here with your friends at the end of the day laughing at me? Just shut up! You’re a liar. Because if this were real, you would have some sort of emotion instead of standing there like a rock. Do you want to feel something? Do you want to feel something real? That’s sad. You never will. No matter how hard you try, you never will."
• Running Gag:
  • The fake Alligator Lounge randomly showing up in episodes in strange ways, such as Nathan having it moved across the country or turning it into a bar.
  • Nathan unnecessarily having rehearsals for every situation.
  • Angela claiming that ordinary things are satanic, such as Halloween.
  • Nathan tricking people into being in rehearsals without their knowledge or using actors to manipulate them.
  • Nathan going into multiple layers of rehearsals.
  • Episode 2 had Robbin constantly mentioning crashing his Scion and bringing up every time he sees a number, connecting it to something.
• Sanity Ball: In any given situation, the sanity ball can be passed between Nathan and the subjects of each episode. While Nathan may weird out people through his awkwardness and lack of social skills, he often later reacts with shock to the same people's bizarre statements. As the show goes on, it also becomes less and less clear to what extent Nathan is really in control of the series, or whether he's genuinely lost sight of the line between reality and fantasy.
  • This is the dynamic between Nathan and Angela, who constantly shift between who is the logical one and who is the strange one in any given situation.
• Satanic Panic: Angela believes Halloween was started by Satanists and is used to perform sacrifices. She also claims that Google is run by Satanists who covered up the truth about the holiday.
  • In episode 5, she gets angry at Nathan for playing a game with Adam where he pretended to eat poop (really a chocolate bar), as she claims that eating poop is a Satanic ritual. Nathan seems to get genuinely frustrated and angrily claims that she's convinced everything is Satanic.
    Nathan: "Next thing you know, I'll bring home some oranges and that will be Satanic!"
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: Robbin quickly bails on coparenting during the first night because the robot baby’s crying isn’t letting him sleep.
• Shout-Out: In the first episode, Kor references Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by comparing Nathan to Wonka and himself to Charlie. At the end of the episode, "Pure Imagine" from the film plays.
• So Unfunny, It's Funny: Nathan's attempts at making jokes usually fall flat, but this awkwardness just makes them funny. For instance, his infamous line "Door city over here."
• Soap Opera Rapid Aging Syndrome: Adam ages three years every week during the rehearsal due to constantly being replaced with new actors to represent growing up. When Nathan leaves for his acting class and returns, he had aged from 6 to 15.
• Stealth Pun: In the third episode, Patrick and his brother had an argument over whether his girlfriend was a gold digger. Later in the episode Patrick helps an old man dig up his stash of gold, making him a literal gold digger.
• The Stoner: Robbin is constantly high, even while driving. He later admitted to Vice that the car crash he keeps referencing in the show occurred because he was high.
• Tagline: "Why leave life to chance?"
• Title Drop: Happens Once per Episode:
  • Kor drops the title of the first episode "Orange Juice, No Pulp" when ordering the titular drink at the bar.
  • Robbin drops the title of the second episode "Scion" multiple times when he talks about crashing his Scion car.
  • Happens in the third episode "Gold Digger" when the Patrick and the actor playing his brother argue over whether his girlfriend is a Gold Digger.
  • The fourth episode's title "The Fielder Method" is the name of the acting class Nathan teaches.
  • The fifth episode's title "Apocalypto" comes from the movie Apocalypto, which Angela says is her favorite movie when Nathan asks her.
  • The sixth episode's title, "Pretend Daddy", is stated multiple times when discussing that Nathan isn’t really Remy's father and is just pretending.
• Toilet Humor: In Episode 5, Nathan and Adam make a video while playing together where Adam is a doctor healing Nathan through farts and poop. While such humor is common with small children, Angela finds this inappropriate and disgusting and gets in a fight with Nathan over it.
• Troubled Teen: In the simulation, Adam becomes extremely troubled by age fifteen due to his father's absence, turning to drugs and other unhealthy lifestyles. This is similar to Angela's actual life, as she also turned to drugs due to her treatment by her father.
• Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist: While ultimately well meaning, Nathan does questionable things and manipulates others, much to comedic effect. As the series goes on, his actions take on darker undertones, including convincing a man his friend has died, faking a teenager ODing, and taking a child to religious services against his mother's wishes and without her knowledge. The degree to which Nathan remains sympathetic becomes a central conceit of episodes 5 and 6, the former of which has Fake Angela giving him a Reason You Suck speech, while the latter examines the long-term implications of the rehearsals when Nathan learns one of the child actors comes from a single-mother household and has now come to believe Nathan is his new father.
• Wham Line: "Pretend Daddy," and thus Season 1, ends with one that may either be a scripted moment of Cringe Comedy or a legitimate slipup on Nathan Fielder's part that further draws into question how in control he was of the series.
  "No. I'm your dad."
• The Wonka: Kor compares Nathan to Wonka, as he is an eccentric but surprisingly capable person with lots of resources and wants to improve the lives of others (often through morally questionable means). Nathan dislikes this comparison, as he sees Wonka as the villain.

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