‘The Rehearsal’ Proves Nathan Fiedler Is the Undisputed King of Cringe Comedy
Nathan Fielder is the undisputed king of cringe comedy, and The Rehearsal is a masterpiece of awkward chaos that plays as both an extension and expansion of his heralded Comedy Central series Nathan for You. Like that cult hit, Fielder’s brilliant six-part HBO debut (July 15) is an attempt by the 39-year-old star to help strangers via strategic partnerships. The difference is that, rather than functioning as a weirdo business consultant, he’s now more akin to a life coach, striving to prepare his subjects for uncomfortable confrontations—as well as their sought-after professional, marital, and parental futures—by staging elaborate rehearsals. What arises from this is some of the most mind-bending madness ever seen on television: think a non-fiction Synecdoche, New York in which Fielder and his compatriots plunge down a hallucinatory rabbit hole of mirror images and mimicry until the lines between the real and the unreal hopelessly blur.
Fielder fundamentally wants to understand others and, through them, himself. That impulse drives The Rehearsal, whose nominal aim is to empower individuals by so expertly predicting upcoming situations and dynamics that they can confidently ace tomorrow’s big moments. It’s a stab at using rigorous and meticulous training to eliminate the element of chance in day-to-day experiences, and it turns out to be even wilder and more amusing than it sounds. Fielder’s modus operandi involves not only devising bizarre scenarios but then doubling and tripling down on them until it’s hard to remember what the starting point even was. That skill is in stellar effect in this endeavor, which explores aspirations and fears by deep-diving into a vortex of artificial impersonation where life’s performative aspects are highlighted, its reactive possibilities are examined, and its uncertainties are challenged—all in an effort to eliminate the anxiety and pain that comes from dealing with circumstances out of one’s control.
Designed by its maker to wrestle with his own insecure and uneasy feelings about the world and his place in it, The Rehearsal is, at its core, heady stuff; Fielder is investigating all sorts of serious neuroses through his ploys. Nonetheless, no matter the intellectual and personal nature of his HBO series, Fielder’s stunts are anything but ponderous. With the stilted disposition and synthetic speaking manner that is his trademark—think a robot programmed to masquerade as a human being—Fielder sets out on his new quest with deadpan enthusiasm and executes it with a level of droll dedication that’s outright nuts. In the penultimate episode, he explains, “Do you know sketch comedy?… You have to escalate the sketch,” and perhaps no modern funnyman has a greater knack for doing just that. Fielder takes things so far that it’s difficult to imagine how he concocted this lunacy and impossible to stop laughing at the bravado of his peculiar showmanship.