The Rehearsal - Nathan Fielder - HBO

lol whoops. I guess the actor was too convincing

Wife and I were wondering if there’s gonna be a twist in the last episode where everybody’s been an actor the whole time and everything we’ve seen has been a rehearsal for making the “actual” show

Haven't read anything about it yet but I imagine this was a particularly arduous show to finish after COVID. The Cheap Chick in the City blog posts Nathan looks at were all from 2019.

Both of the actors were fantastic at capturing their respective subjects.

NGL, this kinda got me emotional at points. It's an insane concept built for max laffs while also addressing some deeper shit. It's basically exposure therapy taken to the most ridiculous extreme.

feels like this show is gonna be “finding frances: the series,” and yeah, sign me up

The character detail on just the few seconds of Thrifty Boy, with him snacking on packets of ketchup…

I would really like to see that insane flow chart they made

https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/9e4/695/487767ff5901db3cbe83303c942e373672-the-rehearsal-ep1.rsquare.w330.jpghttps://64.media.tumblr.com/08d6c9fe2aeec7c979563473924bf015/042f003c17c0df93-1f/s1280x1920/7ea103a34e83a9fff4873364f838f99e062ab6c7.jpg

some Redditor was actually on Cash Cab with this guy a decade ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BADGSUbWfMk

they were part of a trivia team. and yes, he did tell him he had a Masters

(amusingly it seems Cash Cab is also fake - it's a real game show but they don't just pick people up off the street)

“His whole educational status has been a scam.” pic.twitter.com/Zgse9B8jCg

— Scout Tafoya (@Honors_Zombie) July 19, 2022

(amusingly it seems Cash Cab is also fake - it's a real game show but they don't just pick people up off the street)

can confirm

https://www.vulture.com/article/nathan-fielder-the-rehearsal-alligator-lounge-visit.html

My friend Danny showed up, and I asked him what he thought of the episode. He said that in the first scene at the real Alligator Lounge, when it looks as if there are hidden cameras scoping it out, he recognized regulars in the crowd, including one of his friends. And here’s where the plot thickens: Danny said that in the climactic scene in which Kor and Tricia actually do bar trivia, he “didn’t recognize anyone. Even the bartender was different.” Danny said the trivia host in the episode wasn’t the usual guy who hosted in 2019, either. To be clear, Danny is a true Alligator Lounge regular. He knows the space; he knows the crowd. He believed that the confession scene, the one that was supposed to be the “real” moment after many, many staged ones, was more staged than the show let on. He also directed me to a post on the Instagram account of Trivial Dispute, the group that organizes these bar-trivia nights. Overlaid on a screengrab of the episode were the words “AS (SORT OF) SEEN ON THE REHEARSAL! ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTIONS!”

I reached out via Instagram to Adam Kesner, the man behind Trivial Dispute, which hosts a number of trivia nights in bars across New York throughout the week; the group has run the program at Alligator Lounge since 2007. Kesner usually writes the questions every week but confirmed that a different host and pre-written questions were provided by The Rehearsal’s production company for the final trivia night in the episode. “The only issue I had with the show was the subpar question quality,” said Kesner, who theorized that the questions were written to generate those funny “clue inception” beats rather than a challenging night of real-life bar trivia.

layers within layers

Starting to think "Nathan Fielder" is himself an elaborate ruse.

I guess we could still get

a twist in the last episode where everybody’s been an actor the whole time and everything we’ve seen has been a rehearsal for making the “actual” show

This was nuts

Early in the show the guy showed a photo of the whole trivia team, which looked like a typical,uh, size of one of those. Why would this night have been only the two of them?

the gunpowder thing, the answer was gunpowder, not China. How the heck was that question phrased?

he tells nathan early on that he'll invite her to a two-person trivia night with the excuse that they haven't hung out together in awhile or something xp

per the earlier writeup, I'm thinking the two person trivia night is an invention of the show!

i shouldn't have phrased it that way -- it's not that the bar is hosting only teams of two, it's just that their team will just be the two of them for that night

We saw how seriously they all take it. The others are just going to sit one out? I don't think so. Whatever you have to say, you can say it to all of us

I assumed it wasn't their regular night, this was some bonus night at a different bar than usual?

Nathan Fielder is clearly a genius.

iirc i think it was him inviting her to a trivia night that he usually does solo

diabolical

https://cheapchickinthecity.wordpress.com/

they are still playing to this day
but that's about all she can say

Given the size of that massive flow chart I figured having multiple people there would have just been way too complicated

he overplayed his hand with the second episode, this is obviously much more staged than it pretends to be.

still creepy as fuck though

I'm more excited about where the show is going because at this point it could go anywhere. It is clearly scripted and better for it. After the first episode I wondered if it was going to follow the same formula throughout, but now it seems like something weirder is going on.

maybe I’m a rube but I trust nathan completely and I’m just happy to be on the ride

yea i mean who cares if there is a structure, it will overall be better for it

nathan w the scion guy felt like john wilson - amazing & could not have been planned

ep 2 was great, was a little on the fence after ep 1 but now it has immediately gone somewhere weirder and more ambiguous I’m totally on board

discussing whether this experience would be traumatizing for the babies involved of course inevitably led to Is it bad for a baby to see you masturbating?

I was utterly perplexed by this second episode. What purpose did the first episode serve if it was just going to pivot to a multi-episode narrative? Anyone else feel that the first episode was filmed pre-pandemic, and the second much later? Did they really relocate the bar? Is this really going to be a multi-episode arc? It's kind of refreshing to see a show where I have absolutely no idea what's going on.

he overplayed his hand with the second episode, this is obviously much more staged than it pretends to be.

― i cannot help if you made yourself not funny (forksclovetofu), Saturday, July 23, 2022 12:07 AM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I was thinking when Nathan hesitantly agreed to step in as a babysitter that the baby's actual mother was just like a hundred feet away from the house.

But as others have said, I don't really care about any artificial elements. There's a certain suspension of disbelief required here (do we really think he transported his elaborate Alligator Lounge set across state lines on a whim?). And I do half believe One Eye Open's theory that everything we're seeing may be one big rehearsal for something entirely unexpected.

Given the leap between the first and second episode I think that's a really good guess. Like, it's going to end with him in the bar, and then the camera will pan out and reveal that the bar has been rebuilt once again in a warehouse in Antarctica or something. "Maybe we are meant to be alone. Maybe all of life is just a long rehearsal to teach us what it's like to be alone, after everyone and everything we know and love has disappeared or died. Or maybe being alone is our natural state, but being with others is what gives us a soul."

yeah as far my enjoyment of the show i have no interest in whats actually real or staged. I think its clear that he is interested in telling a scripted story about a character, and its going to be told through the lens of a "nathan for you" style comedic reality show but it is not going to actually be that show.

impression I get is that the people are real but the situations may be staged - for instance Kor's insistence that trivia night goes well is probably something the producers told him to do, but Kor's dilemma itself were probably real. I think NFY would pull tricks like that a lot. as for this recent one I don't think either one of them were actors (Robin seems to have an online trail of being a weird dude) but I am guessing they tried pretty hard to drive Robin out of that house

but yeah blurring the lines between real and staged is sort of this show's whole deal, not to mention a lot of what NFY was doing near the end

Interesting. I haven't looked up Robin at all, but sleeping in a different room and being woken up at least once felt like plenty to get him out of there.

ugh, i had to tap out during the scene where she's whispering her prayer. it's "cringe", but that shit really does hit home. i remember being surrounded by people whispering these things to themselves, always loud enough that the adults next to them (and me, who i guess they thought was too little/childish to understand what was going on) could hear, and remembering the passages in my illustrated bible showing pharisees loudly praying with their faces and hands turned up to god so that everyone nearby could hear them. "i just pray father that you would place your hand heavy upon this production, heavy on nathan..." that kind of stuff particularly, the "place your hand heavy up on this production" shit -- people saying things that are very unnatural, that they heard somewhere else, when someone else was praying too loudly, which just so happens to make them feel like they are world-historic characters during the end times conversing directly with god, get it ouuuuuuuut

ok, though, the roommate arguing with the pseudo-husband about the coincidences of numbers...oh...they're fighting now. ok. he doesn't have a license plate.

*watches episode through fingers*

this is the classic nathan fielder feeling

xp fwiw, having never witnessed this, that scene was super cringe

the dude was wild. Kinda surprised people looked into him and he's for real. Like maybe too weird to make up... but he almost felt like an actor playing a bizarre guy one of the writers met.

For anyone who still had any doubt that my brother is a dangerous psycho, please watch S1E2 of The Rehearsal, and see for yourself ☺️

— lite-skinned dy-no-mite (@Sall_Gud) July 23, 2022

now i really want to know what him and the roommate were shouting about

from what i could tell, they were yelling about who was stepping up, what that meant, and whether or not one or both of them would or should step up in that situation

What do you know there’s an article about him

https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkgpng/the-most-fascinating-guest-on-the-rehearsal-who-crashed-a-scion-tc-at-100-mph-did-not-enjoy-his-time-on-the-show

Judging by this interview I’d say the show did portray him somewhat accurately

But Stone feels like his treatment during his time on the show, as well as his portrayal after the fact, was fueled by a personal vendetta from Fielder himself, whom he described as invasive and provoking. He said he’d gotten a weird vibe about the project from the start.

No shit.

also:

I just learned that my brother was made a fool of on Nathan Fielders new, upcoming show and I’ve never been happier

— lite-skinned dy-no-mite (@Sall_Gud) December 26, 2021

whoops missed that voodoo chili, has posted abt the cnn interview hours earlier. there were some good laffs in the full 15min segment, including him referring to himself as a hero who saved hundreds of innocent lives (bc he landed the plane safely)

Just finished my god. The one actor who questioned how many of the other actors declined to get on the flight and then responded with “actors” was amazing

need a comp of the accompanying promos for this season as a b-sides collection to the season

what would the difference be between a licensed commercial pilot certified to fly a 737 flying a bunch of actors in the plane and Nathan, a licensed commercial pilot certified to fly a 737 be?

Nathan's also apparently been flying empty 737s around as a side gig and that's pretty verifiable

I liked how his reaction to his copilots squinting face mirrored the autism test he struggled with

I think one of Nathan's greatest strengths isn't doing things that seem unreal, but instead doing things that are completely out of left field far in advance and only pulling back the curtain at the last minute

he admits it on the show, but he obviously had conversations where he explained to the pilots that he, himself, was a licensed pilot to be honest and build rapport throughout the entire season and he cut every single one of them! we get to the last episode and we're finally in on the bit. just an amazing payoff

I doubt he'd go that deep again, but it's funny to imagine a season where he's doing something similar but about Nascar drivers, and we get to the last episode and he walks over to a car that has the SUMMIT ICE logo splashed across the hood and he jumps in

lol yeah a real missed opportunity to not have summit ice livery on the plane, that would have been incredible

I just read a New Yorker piece on the finale and was thinking that he really is the closest to Andy Kaufman as far as effectively blurring the line on if they really are that way or not

what would the difference be between a licensed commercial pilot certified to fly a 737 flying a bunch of actors in the plane and Nathan, a licensed commercial pilot certified to fly a 737 be?

Well, if what the show said is accurate, about 1500 hours in the air, plus other certification standards that he didn't get, vs. a loophole? This is something I just saw on Indiewire:

For “The Rehearsal,” we see some of that prep work in the show’s most stunning flashback to date — the two years that Fielder spent training to become a licensed commercial pilot type-rated to fly a 737, and the show’s search for a rentable 737 safe enough to fly. Fielder was still probably well short of the flight hours needed to achieve his airline transport pilot’s license at the time of shooting “The Rehearsal” finale, which is the certification that the vast majority of pilots flying passenger planes have.

But even so, Fielder dedicated himself to learning enough material to fill a college degree in a condensed amount of time, in addition to his work as a comedian. Although it comes out a little bit heartbreaking as the final voiceover of the series, from an insurance perspective if Fielder’s allowed to be in the cockpit, then he must be fine.

The main answer, therefore, in how “The Rehearsal” got away with packing a real airplane full of real people (even if they are actors) and flying it in the actual sky is that Fielder did the work to be qualified to fly it, that the production found a plane airworthy enough (thankfully, without bird nests), and that the team around Fielder, from his co-pilot to the show’s aviation consultants (two are credited in the episode, Steve Giordano and Robert Allen) to the crew in the chase plane, were experienced enough for HBO’s army of lawyers to agree they had indeed mitigated as much risk as possible.

the other trick is that there was a licensed passenger airline pilot in the cockpit, it just wasn’t Nathan

I remember from discussions on PPRUNE that the typical cost to become a pilot for Ryanair was something in the region of £103,000 - for some reason the £3,000 at the end stood out - and you have to cough up that money yourself. Actually, no, a bit of Googling reveals that it's €103,500:
https://afta.ie/mentorship-ryanair/eu-ryanair-future-flyer-programme-ab-initio/

If my calculations are correct you spend 98 hours flying and a lot of time in the simulator and attending "long briefs", unless I'm misreading it and that's part of the uniform. Ryanair pays its captains £70k/€80k, so assuming you're willing to slum it, you'd start to make a profit after working 4-5 years. By that time you would be sick of seeing Spain from forty thousand feet. I assume a lot of that course involves night-time navigation and route planning stuff that Fielder probably wouldn't have had to bother with.

Imagine for the next series of The Rehearsal that Fielder tries to sort out Tom Cruise's life. By dressing up as Tom Cruise, following Tom Cruise around, attending premieres with Tom Cruise. Imagine that the final episode is released to cinemas as a reboot of the Mission: Impossible franchise starring Nathan Fielder, and imagine that it's a huge success. That would be a heck of a thing.

I wonder how difficult it would be to erase an actor's film history and replace it with AI. Imagine a background actor in the recent streaming version of Willow who only appeared in that show - I pick Willow because it never had a physical release and it's currently unavailable. Imagine if Fielder took over that man's life and, with AI, replaced him, George Lucas-style. Imagine doing that with multiple releases spread across different studios, over a long period of time. That would be an impressive stunt. At this point the elaborate nature of the stunt has taken over from the emotional core of the programme.

Or imagine if he surreptitiously replaced every physical copy of a particularly rare printing of the Bible with an exact duplicate that has "thou shalt commit adultery" instead of the original wording.

Funny you should mention Tom Cruise. I just saw the new M:I this afternoon and the Rehearsal finale tonight, and there’s definitely some similarity between Tom Cruise hanging off a biplane in midair to entertain an audience and presumably to prove to himself that he’s still got it and Nathan flying a 737 and concluding “I must be ok.” I guess what I’m saying is Nathan is the Tom Cruise of comedy.

That CNN interview is great. Love when he starts interrogating Wolf Blitzer. “You were in Mission: Impossible.”

one thing the Sully episode reminded me of was the NFY where he elaborately concocts a wild scenario all so that he has a story to tell on Jimmy Kimmel. in retrospect that feels like a dry run for this show. as does the episode where he creates "The Hunk".

interesting how with NFY there was always this open question of how much of it was real, how much the subjects actually knew, and whether any of them were actually actors...whereas The Rehearsal sees that line and stomps all over it. gotta say I was pretty thrilled by the turn Ep 5 makes (the autism one), after it spent time wondering how many pilots may have undiagnosed mental issues I wondered if he'd look inward like that

also wanna say Nathan muttering "oh fuck" as he's getting blasted with milk from the giant puppet Mommy is probably the hardest I've ever laughed at anything on TV save for maybe certain On Cinema moments

that moment felt like the "real" Nathan slipping out (if there ever is such a thing on his shows)

it definitely felt like it happened when that lady was talking about getting turned on by Einstein

anyways one moment that really stuck out to me was Nathan testing out the whacking off on a bus joke in the mock Congressional hearing. nobody laughs the first time, then he takes them aside to ask if they thought the joke was funny, and when they said they did, he tells them to just act as normal, if something's funny they can laugh. so in the next take everyone is doubled over in laughter in a clearly exaggerated fashion.

what I loved about that scene (outside of it being hilarious) was how it suggested that an actor who is just playing "a normal person" with no other direction still puts that layer of distance between themselves and the character, they're focused on the 'performance' and therefore ignore their normal impulses (such as laughing at a joke), which is a microcosm of what the show is about. but at the same time it's sort of a macrocosm (is that a word?) of the show's theme, since the bit is obviously scripted (at least the last part was). I feel like a lot of the things he tried to do didn't actually go as he hoped - I think he really was ultimately trying to get a law changed, he really did want Colin and the actress to fall in love, he was trying to get something interesting to happen with the dog clone but nothing really did. this happened in NFY all the time. but in the actual show itself, Nathan can control everything that happens. he can use the footage to tell whatever story he wants to. he's the captain.

also I felt the smile he cracked when everyone was uncontrollably laughing was actually kind of genuine. I mean it was still him telling the joke. that's another theme he explores a lot, whether an acting performance can make you feel a real emotion. kinda dovetails with the stuff he does in Ep 3 with the fake Colins.

Iirc one of the few clear examples of him breaking character is in the Nathan for You episode when the guy admits to drinking his own piss.

*his grandchild’s piss

lol that's right!

Someone dug this up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuTd6xUyLos

I liked S1 pretty much, but S2 was better in pretty much every way. It felt like it hit harder and was also funnier.

That scene where Nathan is contemplating getting the fMRI results to find out if he has autism, etc. felt so real with the flashbacks to him copying people growing up like it was something he had wrestled with his entire life.

i felt pretty up and down watching s2 but ultimately it had so many amazing moments. The baby Sully stuff had me rofling. The pack bit was a bit annoying and brought to mind an Armando Ianucci sketch. but the last ep was great for all the reasons discussed upthread.

Something not touched on but significant I think is that the cultural deference of junior pilots to their more superiors in Asian countries would potentially make them less likely to speak up if something was amiss

That's a take Malcolm Gladwell has been promoting since 2008. Ask A Korean gets into specifics and rightly doesn't hold back. My tl;dr is that the hierarchial culture of aviation and piloting supercedes anything else

I kinda like how we have decades of East Asian pop culture (films/TV in particular) being more generally familiar elsewhere where there's any number of takes about how authority figures suck and should be countered/avoided, hierarchy is bunk etc. and yet you get the Gladwells of the world falling back on convenient stereotypes when it suits.

My impression is that the “hierarchy is bunk” stance is still unconventional (and therefore fodder for drama) but still in place among the rank and file irl

yes, that is the premise for the series, unless you’re still on the racial angle

Finally got around to speed running season 2 and up-front, I've long been a Fielder-skeptic but did listen to folks' recommendations and even post on this thread without really having anything spoiled. The last two episodes are some of the best I've seen and are worth the long (but required) lead up. I often wonder just how far into the spectrum I am myself and related hard to how Nathan circles around how imposter syndrome and the masking of someone on the spectrum reflect back upon each other. Especially when it's all amplified in the high stakes of an airplane cockpit and masking becomes a professional skill despite the long term consequences. Final voice over worth the whole trip.

https://qc-ckb.s3.amazonaws.com/ilx/reherasal-ifyourehere.jpg

I binged s1 and s2 in a week, and frankly it is the most incredible non-fiction TV show I've ever seen.

Anyone know if there's, like, a Making-Of or a good podcast about this? I feel like I need to know more. The show clearly does an incredible job of concentrating literal YEARS of events into a few carefully-selected scenes.

And i've got questions. The main question is "How?", like, how did he have the foresight to train for a pilot's licence two years prior to ostensibly deciding he had to fly a passenger plane as part of his experiment? Maybe I'm being extremely naive abd I've fallen for the old smoke'n'mirrors, but still...

Like Elvis Telecom, I related to a lot of the last couple of episodes. The bit where Nathan says "Yes but that's how everyone thinks. Everyone does this, right?"... Youch...

one thing I've read about Nathan For You (possibly in an interview with Nathan himself) is that a lot of the narratives in the show are constructed post-facto, since a good chunk of it does depend on how actual people are going to react, so sometimes you're seeing 50+ hours of footage reduced to 7 minutes to tell a story that was never really there. How to With John Wilson does this even more I think. for instance I think he really was trying to get those two to fall in love, and if he succeeded maybe that would be the major focal point of the season.

as far as getting his pilot's license I'm getting that was the central idea of Season 2, maybe they had a bunch of ways where that could be the big reveal but the pilot communication thing was just the avenue that got the best footage. I also kinda wonder about that singing competition, if that was supposed to play a different role somehow

Yeah, I think it's telling how often they just switch gears. Like how the first season started with him training people to interact in that replica bar (trivia night, dates, etc.) and ended up with him living in a house with that woman, or how this season featured such big productions as the singing competition or Paramoun (or whomever) as Nazis, but ended with a totally different scenario that almost overshadowed the rest of the show. In some ways it's part of the meta nature of the show/Fielder, showing how the sausage is made, in a sense, sculpting his schemes, which themselves often rely on conspicuous artifice, into something real and profound. Like the swapping of the kids in the slide in the first season, an explicit affront to reality while still capturing something "real." It's the nature of reality shows themselves, both real and clearly not real at the same time.

DL, did you miss the bit where he admitted that he'd told all the pilots that he was a pilot himself, but edited that out of all of their on-screen interactions? it was always part of the bit

and who knows, maybe he's really been into airplane accidents for years and conceptualized the entire bit over a very long time. step one: become a pilot

xpost, at the end of the second season I really thought he was going to bring his journey to become a pilot back to the questions he posed at the beginning of the season - what is it about pilot /co-pilot interactions that lead to airplane crashes? as much as i loved the show, i thought it would have benefited from a final episode to tie the season's story arc together. but maybe that's not his style

step one: become a pilot a decade ago
step two: get in a bunch of accidents and close calls that call into question the nature of pilot interaction
step three: create a reality show purporting to address these concerns
step four: pretend to learn to fly for the sake of the show

apparently he revealed on a podcast that he spent a year or two of daily practicing walking a tightrope and that was about a three minute blip in a Nathan for You episode

Yeah, but that was also the basis of the entire episode, iirc. And one of the more conceptual ones as well. Maybe a season finale?

Just found this:

https://www.theringer.com/2017/09/20/pop-culture/nathan-for-you-bill-simmons-podcast

Fielder spent seven months training for the wire walk, an idea the crew had been contemplating since the previous season. Though the original plan wasn’t to have Fielder do the walk, they couldn’t think of a funnier solution.

“That was an idea we had in the second season of the show, and we didn’t really have the resources or time to execute it properly,” Fielder said. “So we put it on hold, and when we started to do the third season we knew we wanted to do that. So we had kind of thought about it, and I started training very early. We talked for a while about, ‘There’s got to be a way to do this where I don’t have to be the one wire-walking.’ Because it’s such a waste of time for such a small (payoff). It’s one part of one episode, and everyone we talked to was saying it takes two or three years to kind of really do it at that scale. And so we couldn’t figure out a funnier way or another way to do it, so I just started working at it and started doing it while we were shooting and writing. I would train on the weekends.”

I did think S2 finished a bit abruptly. Yay, he flew the plane! What did we learn? I guess everything? Ever?

I learned a lot about 23 second choruses

one thing that's interesting about rewatching NFY is it's apparent how many of his schemes really don't work out at all, and the ones that do you can kinda tell there's a point where he has to abort the whole thing for legal reasons

one of the more fascinating ones is the episode where he tries to drum up business for a cab company by trying to get a pregnant woman to give birth in the cab, despite the cabbie willing to go along with it 100% there's a point where he's like come on, we can't actually do this, wonder what went on behind the scenes there