nathan fielder is a human
The Rehearsal confronts us with ourselves. Is it any wonder so many have chosen to recoil in horror?
Nathan Fielder is a human being. I feel it necessary to point that out because he seems like what would happen if an alien visited Earth in a human disguise. He's that homeschooled kid you meet at a college chess club, so socially inept and awkward you feel your own social skills evaporating with every moment you're exposed to him. He makes Mark Zuckerberg seem like Bruce Wayne. One look at his pasty, sallow visage and spindly body is enough to make skin crawl. A look into his dead eyes will sever your soul from its mortal coil. His monotone voice is the auditory equivalent of licking a garden slug. Among some descriptive terms that might elucidate his personality are: repulsive, uncanny, disturbing, disquieting, painful, and sociopathic.
So what's with all the controversy?
Fielder has made a name for himself as the master of cringe comedy. During his time on Canadian public television, he honed his ability to leverage his off-putting presence in the service of making interviews feel like bad acid trips. He revels in the discomfort of his subjects, who soon realize they are trapped in front of a camera across from a madman. You can see the hint of a devilish smile threatening to break through his toad-like façade—something he will take greater pains to avoid in later work—as he grills his own boss about which of his segments he's seen, or when he asks a Best Buy employee to sell him a product, then rebukes the guy for trying.
Around the time Fielder started his subsequent Comedy Central show, Nathan for You, he ran a series of social pranks on Twitter. In one instance, he instructed his followers, "Experiment: text the person ur dating 'I haven't been fully honest with you'" then dont reply to them for 1 hr (& tweet pic of thr response)." The results were predictably chaotic, with some of the pranked partners going so far as to admit cheating in an attempt to preempt whatever disclosure they assumed they were going to receive.
Until now, Nathan for You was Fielder's crown jewel, a masterwork of social psychology and unexpected laughs. The premise is simple: Nathan is a business guru who helps struggling small businesses turn their fortunes. But rather than revamping their marketing, he proposes harebrained schemes that fall apart under the slightest scrutiny. In one episode, he institutes a "you break it, you bought it" policy at an antiques shop, then lures drunkards into the store to wreak havoc. In another, a hotelier is convinced to put child-sized, soundproof boxes inside of suites so guests can lock their children in them and have undisturbed sex.
Is it demented? Yes. Exploitative? Sometimes. Do I look through my fingers in horror, feeling the moist grip of cringe around my beating heart? Dear god, it's unbearable. But whereas some shows would revel purely in the spectacle of it all, Fielder elevates each episode with a delicate touch that reveals the fundamental urges and drives of humankind. As his marks are sucked into the world he builds around their simple lives, we see reflected in them the parts of ourselves we'd prefer not to acknowledge. The people Fielder interacts with are, in turns, greedy, desperate, clueless, vain, and in need of professional help—real help, not the illusion of it offered by Fielder. It's a portrait of humanity, sores and all, and once you break through the pain of recognizing your own flaws in these people, a second layer of relatability appears, one in which we see that everyone, as the song goes, is looking for something.
It is that secondary, empathetic quality that Fielder highlights in his new HBO series, The Rehearsal. The premise of the show, like Nathan for You, is deceptively simple. This time, instead of businesses, Fielder sets out to help struggling individuals accomplish their personal goals through incomprehensibly complex methods. In the first episode, a history teacher named Kor responds to a Craigslist ad asking if there's "something you want to get off your chest." Kor is part of a devoted bar trivia squad, but he's been lying to them about his level of education for over a decade, claiming to have a master's degree when he has only a bachelor's. To help him come clean to one of these friends, Fielder rehearses Kor's confession dozens of times in a precise replica of the bar he and his friend will attend for trivia night.
Contrasted with the simplicity of the task at hand, Fielder's scheme is hilariously complicated, involving hundreds of craftsmen, technicians, and actors, in addition to flowchart software which Fielder uses to map out every possible way the confession might unfold. At one point, Kor compares Fielder to Willy Wonka, and it's an apt analogy. Wonka puts a group of children in bizarre scenarios to determine who should inherit his chocolate factory, but he's also a "dream-maker," as Kor puts it. What are the crew of The Rehearsal if not Fielder's Oompa-Loompas? Â And yet, as Fielder retorts, Wonka is a bad dude who murders children and manipulates people in pursuit of his goals. As the episode closes out and the credits roll, we hear Gene Wilder singing "Pure Imagination."
Over the past week, Fielder has come under fire from new viewers, who have accused him of being cruel and manipulative. Exploitation is a term I've seen thrown around, along with a predictable cluster of terms co-opted from pop psychology: manipulative, toxic, insert buzzword here.
It's not hard to see why someone firing up HBO Max and encountering Fielder's work for the first time would feel deeply uncomfortable with what the comedian does. He's an acquired taste, like caviar, or the smell of your partner's genitals, and that discomfort is something he tries deliberately to inflict on his audience. Both Nathan for You and The Rehearsal are made more viscerally real by Fielder's narration, wherein he explains with detail how his ruses are constructed. Where other reality shows would coerce their participants into risky behavior, then edit the scene to remove the producers' meddlings, Fielder places himself fully into the narrative, telling viewers to our faces what he did to elicit the bizarre behavior his subjects demonstrate. But unlike those reality shows, which will routinely abuse their participants (for example, starving them and loading them up on booze while berating them), Fielder never needs to stoop so low. Instead, he gives his subjects the gentlest of nudges and lets them walk their own plank. Willy Wonka, indeed.
The ruckus began in earnest when the second episode of The Rehearsal aired. In it, Fielder gives the rehearsal treatment to a woman named Angela, who has dreamed of having kids but cannot seem to establish a set of conditions under which she feels comfortable raising them. The plan? Give Angela a two month-long scenario in which she will raise a child from infancy to 18 years old. This is accomplished by hiring a range of child actors, beginning with infants who are swapped out every few hours to avoid violating child labor laws. Those laws preclude the possibility of keeping the babies overnight, so a robotic baby that cries until "soothed" is placed in the crib every evening.
If you're still onboard, congratulations on being a weirdo. Welcome to the club. On any other show, that conceit would stand alone. But for Fielder, the layers multiply. We quickly learn that Angela is a devout Christian. Well into her thirties, she is saving herself for marriage, and when she's alone in the camera-infested rural home Fielder has given her for the month, she prays for God to show Nathan who the real boss is. Angela seems eager to bring Christ into every conversation, no matter how obscure the relation to the subject at hand, and comes across as a perfect stereotype of the self-righteous worshipper nonbelievers roll their eyes at. And lest you think we're done, this is where the episode really comes off the rails.
Since Angela has mentioned wanting to raise her future child with a husband by her side, Fielder sets her up on a series of dates to find someone who can play the "role" of a father in her constructed rehearsal scenario. It is not long before we meet Robbin, a man who immediately tops Angela as the true star of the episode. Robbin would like you to know that he crashed his Scion tC at 100 miles per-hour while drunk and stoned. He would like you to know that he's extremely into numerology, the practice of interpreting random numbers such as those on his speedometer as messages from God.
Any rational person can see that Robbin is a volatile person from a mile away. My hackles were raised within a minute of his appearance when he and Angela go on a coffee date. A couple things are important to note here. Angela mentions to him that drinking and smoking weed led her to what she considers a dark chapter in her life. She also mentions her vow of chastity, making clear to him that he should not expect sex anytime soon. But from her perspective the date goes well, despite Robbin's constant mentions of his inebriated car wreck and obsession with holy numbers, and Fielder encourages her to invite him into the rehearsal.
When Angela proposes to Robbin that he move into the reality show and co-parent her fake children, Robbin agrees without hesitation. It is clear to viewers that he thinks he's going to get lucky, telling Fielder that "the door is open" to sex even though Angela has told him multiple times that it is emphatically closed. When he moves into the house, Fielder accompanies Robbin back to his apartment. Robbin rattles on about the symbolism of numbers on street signs the whole way there, then nearly gets into a fistfight with his roommate—who, as a non-Christian, Robbin claims is a "demon"—before smoking weed and trying to drive his car back to the house without license plates. At the house, Angela tells him he'll need to get up and feed the robot baby if it cries, and Robbin agrees. He watches softcore porn in bed, then bails on the entire scenario the first time he's awoken by the crying "baby" and realizes he's not going to get his dick wet.
Robbin is, without parallel, the scummiest guy Fielder has ever put on television, and in the wake of the episode's HBO debut, his family members took to the internet to inform the public that no, none of it was edited and yes, he really is like that.
Still, an outcry arose. How could Fielder exploit both Angela and Robbin without any remorse? What kind of monster is this tall, scrawny Canadian, anyway, who uses people so callously and humiliates them on so public a stage? He must be stopped before anyone else gets hurt!
Some answers to these questions are broadly obvious. This is reality TV, and exploitation is the name of the game, baby. Moreover, it's not as if Fielder had to do much work to get these people to play themselves. They're victims of their own hubris. In the wake of seeing himself on The Rehearsal, Robbin agreed to an interview with Vice, in which his defense amounted to telling the reporter that not only was he drunk and high when he crashed his car, he was also speedracing another car on a crowded freeway and knew his vehicle had problems with the steering mechanism. He additionally revealed that he'd been fired from his job for drinking and clarified that, actually, he'd talked a lot more about Jesus than what they showed in the episode, thank you very much.
But I think there's something deeper at work. I don't think the people offended by The Rehearsal are mad that a weird and creepy dude was shown to be weird and creepy. Once again, that's the bread and butter of reality TV. Instead, I think they were offended that, unlike other reality shows, The Rehearsal doesn't take pains to normalize that behavior within its world. There's no game to win, no survival challenge to endure (unless you count being around Nathan Fielder for extended periods of time as an endurance challenge, which I certainly do). There's absolutely no pretense in which to cloak the spectacle of humiliation.
Consider a show like Netflix's extremely popular Too Hot to Handle, which scouts for people who like to fuck at the drop of a hat, sticks them all in close quarters, then penalizes them under the watchful gaze of an Alexa-like AI for, you know, fucking at the drop of a hat. Each of these contestants are far more volatile than Robbin, and the show takes every opportunity to create toxic situations and emotional distress for them.
Consider a show like Fox's I Wanna Marry "Harry," wherein a Prince Harry lookalike guides a group of young women into believing they are competing for the hand of the real Duke of Sussex. The fake prince takes them on dates and hints at his invented royal bloodline while the producers work behind the scenes to gaslight the contestants into believing the ruse. The show was so blatantly unethical, so violating to the consent of these women, that it was canceled after only four episodes had aired.
Hell, consider a show like that most ubiquitous of reality shows, The Bachelor, which has been plagued by scandals season after season and revels in the misogynistic process of making young women humiliate themselves as they compete against each other for a man's affection.
All of these shows make The Rehearsal feel tame by comparison, but they have each constructed a reality in which their violations of common decency are understood as the "rules of the game." To behave respectably on these shows would feel out of place, not the other way around. By contrast, The Rehearsal is an improv stage. Influenced as its participants may be by the presence of cameras and crew to act in ways they might otherwise wisely choose not to, they are not given a set of rules to follow. The façade of television is stripped away by Fielder himself, whose voiceover tells us everything he has done to orchestrate the scenarios in which they find themselves. Most reality hosts are puppeteers, but on The Rehearsal, Fielder shows us the strings.
Watching Fielder's work, I find myself wondering what shameful part of my own personality I'd reveal in the same situation. The obliviousness his subjects demonstrate to their delusions and oddities forces me to wonder whether others perceive me in a colder, less kind light than I perceive myself. If I were on The Rehearsal, would I, too, be the butt of the joke?
I suspect many first-time viewers of Fielder's work were confronted with the same disquieting questions upon seeing The Rehearsal. It is a show that wants you to confront those questions, to probe yourself and understand that you are not less fallible a human being than any other. Fielder wants you examine the character you play for the world. He wants you to consider what would happen if that mask slipped and you were truly known. And once you do, there are only two options: you can see yourself from that exterior perspective and perhaps learn to accept it, or you can recoil in horror like Caliban from his reflection in the looking glass. Is it any wonder so many people have chosen the latter?