The Rehearsal - Nathan Fielder - HBO

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

strikes me that literally no one has ever been more innately accurately portrayed than robin on this show

so they went to the beach to find the weirdest guy possible - nice job!

what did they say on the episode, that they asked the lady to meet up with Tinder matches?

My hardest laugh was when he said his goal is to play in the NBA, and now his brother tells us he's 30?!

someone clipped this off his Insta....am I reading this right? the roommate has now gone to Hell?

https://i.imgur.com/4lbckKF.jpg

My hardest laugh was when he said his goal is to play in the NBA,

same. i did an irl lol at that one, one that came out kind of sounding like ".....HA!! YES!"

i instantly started imagining him shooting some threes at a friend's house and getting really into it

Hardest laugh for me was probably "[long pause] Well first off, it's eels."

in the woman praying loudly so everyone could hear scene iirc she mentioned something about god being the one in control so i took it as her way to assert herself in a situation in which she knew she wasn't in control of how she would be depicted by passive-aggressively undercutting nathan/production's authority lol

I saw the episode time was winding down and we hadn't even got past babies yet and I was worried Angela was going to bail on the project. very happy this story is continuing and I guess throwing the bar from ep 1 in there is an attempt to create a seasonal through-line

So ... what's up with that first episode, then?

Yeah it’s weird to do a one off and then make it a serial. But everything about this show is odd

It isn’t weird if the idea is to fake out the audience about what the show is really about with the first episode

I mean…..has a show ever done that before?

At the the end of ep 1 the setting for the post-climax was so odd. An alleyway or driveway with both of them pressed against a brick wall. ??? And I didn’t pick up on the fact that it was the rehearsal actor until I read it upthread. Those bug eyes freaked me out.

i feel like watching a third episode would be good, before trying to figure out the pattern of the entire show

after ep 2 I absolutely felt like the first ep was a fake out

but who knows how i will feel after ep 3

In preparation for the rest of the episodes I sat on a replica couch watching a replica smart tv that even has the same faulty remote and app selection. I brought in an actor to play my wife, who I watch the show with, that has secretly studied her extensively and has mirrored our exact arguments about where I’ve been going lately and why I get home so late and why I’ve been spotted going to a soundstage with a different woman and who is she and why is she always following and watching my wife and why am I taking notes when we’re arguing and what is that weird chart.

yeah same

I don’t think I missed it above, but if I did, apologies

Tricia’s blog: https://cheapchickinthecity.wordpress.com/2022/07/19/cheap-chick-in-the-city-and-therehearsal/
she also has a twitter account, both seem pretty well-established. some weirdness where the internet archive doesn’t have it before late october 2020, but that’s pretty easily explained as it doesn’t crawl everything

robbin’s brother’s twitter account seems legit enough, started 2009

creative editing aside, I am pretty sure they found people who genuinely are interested in being on a low rent reality show and are, to put it mildly, quirky

e1 thoughts: Kor really does seem like an awkward guy who has genuine affection for Tricia but has shoved his foot in his mouth, or seen other people do that, and ended up getting chastised in the past. I am guessing the cameras clued her into the fact something was going on so she was primed for his confession, but it also seems possible that she genuinely didn’t care. Kor’s response to Nathan seemed truncated, but when he called Nathan a terrible person, Nathan seemed to feel that or really sold it
Nathan’s entire shtick of feeling awkward for real, but playing it off as a gimmick kind of hits home in a weird way. He really did get divorced! And the entire “we scripted an elderly person jumping in the pool to interrupt the moment where I might have to elaborate about my real life” is just.. his possibly real insecurity being worked around in a manipulative way, but he straight up says “I am manipulating this moment”

e2, oh boy, that’s a doozy and I want to see if this plays out in another episode

Lol the guy calling Nathan a terrible person was the actor. A lot of people seemed to miss that!

Anyway Robbin himself actually joined the NFY FB group and posted a bunch of pics of himself with Angela. They got deleted because the whole thing was getting too weird. But it did cross my mind that maybe….just maybe…all this social media stuff is part of the show

xp lol

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