The Rehearsal - Nathan Fielder - HBO

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

I think it is and it isn’t? The participants they selected really seem like people who want to feel seen.

I guess this show is evidence that postmodernism is still a thing

it's the ultimate virtual reality tv show

we are the contestants

Just saw E2 and was convinced the show was 95-100% staged/written and everyone was actors until seeing the tweets supposedly posted here by Robin's brother.

Toward the end of E2 there is an extended scene of Nathan supposedly calling the parents of the child actors to get permission for him to appear on the show, using an elaborate flow chart similar to the one created during the rehearsal in E1. This scene is incredibly strange to me: if he created the flow chart the same way he did in E1 (by numerous rehearsals), it implies he has rehearsed the possibility that he would join the show as a parent. Regardless, that scene seems incredibly fake to me.

Huh? He never said that’s the only way one can make s flow chart. His “character” is a dude who likes to be prepared for everything and have a script to follow in any situation where others’ reactions are unpredictable. That is to say, a dude who likes flow charts.

While it is 100% scripted and fictional so not comparable in that sense, I will say this show is reminding me of Review with Andy Daly as much as NFY. Particularly with the pivot from a fairly formulaic premise to more of a serialized style because of how the host’s role affects their own life.

I think Nathan made that flowchart after he decided he would join the experiment, but I honestly could see him preparing for the possibility before the opportunity came up. I can relate to Nathan and the concept of this show so much - I always do mental "what-ifs" to prepare for potential scenarios and well-beyond, into exceedingly unlikely scenarios (and, like Nathan, still am usually not prepared for the situations that do happen)

fuck me, this got even stranger

I love it so much. The highest level of episode release anticipation since Twin Peaks: The Return.

what am i watching

I was getting really into a monologue and it was serious and touching, then the visual of the way their crops were bearing fruit made me totally lose it but then it became poignant again SO GOOD How can a show that has a gross out Jackass type stunt make it shocking but kind? Wtf?

My wife abandoned this before the first episode was over because cringe isn’t her thing, but I’m going to try to get her back on it. So much more than cringe.

Huh? He never said that’s the only way one can make s flow chart. His “character” is a dude who likes to be prepared for everything and have a script to follow in any situation where others’ reactions are unpredictable. That is to say, a dude who likes flow charts.

Nah, I think mine is better. In other words, I wouldn't be surprised if every episode reveals another layer of rehearsal, which is another way of saying:

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 seen E3.

omg @ this

when your three year old son goes into his room...and emerges a six year old a minute later...it can be hard to stay in the moment...so you need to have custom digital mirrors installed that allow to see yourself age at the same pace as your child..

he's not wrong

Any time they show footage of someone crawling in a window to replace a human child with a robot or mannequin I lose it and start cracking up

xps It's easy to imagine the Nathan we know, from this show and his last one, absolutely intending to shoehorn himself into being the dad and having the chance to feel a feeling.

"not everything is make believe. some things are real."

"....okay."

third episode is so good. the vegetable harvest at the end is just...unbelievable levels of naiveté, it's extraordinary to watch

let alone the gold digger experience. holy shit. it's also so, so hard to explain, it's hilarious.

what am i watching

― Guayaquil (eephus!)

it's funny to watch how they address the absurdity of the cameras and countdown timers to Destiny the nanny:

Nathan: "So Angela and I are in a kind of a non-traditional, non-romantic relationship. We're here to co-parent this child as part of a rehearsal"
Angela: "it's a simulated experience"
Nathan: "...yeah, before deciding if we want to do it in our real lives..."
Angela: "separately."

loooool

i should shut up about it, sorry for any spoilers. when everyone's done watching this i want to talk about the absolute absurdity of what angela's simulated experience is turning into, looooooool

Angela's dialogue has to be real, right? Not that nobody could write this, exactly, but I somehow feel nobody would.

A weird piece in the New Yorker that really sees this show as mean in a way I absolutely don't

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-front-row/the-cruel-and-arrogant-gaze-of-nathan-fielders-the-rehearsal

angela is 100% real, even if not, she’s a person that is out there somewhere even if not on this show

there’s a pretty big unsaid thing where these people, even if they’re unaware of Nathan, have to be aware of reality television to some extent and puzzling out the moments when they’re being themselves or being a character merge

jfc, that New Yorker writer is an insufferable idiot.

The last 3 minutes of this episode, holy shit

Wait, Richard Brody has a silly opinion? What?!

Just realized the “gold digger” plot culminated in them literally digging up gold

Lmao at the dude just bailing afterwards, guessing if this was mostly scripted they’d at least have some kind of resolution

Idk Nathan getting ghosted at a theme park funnel cake meet up was kind of the perfect button on that storyline.

this show is amazing, I just want endless episodes of it

also, the woman fake-eating the chicken was such a small thing but I laughed so hard

om nom nom nom

Also the focus on the kid's face right in the beginning when she reveals that she doesn't celebrate halloween, and his timing soon after when he interrupts her to see if she will dress as a fried egg instead.

Any time they show footage of someone crawling in a window to replace a human child with a robot or mannequin I lose it and start cracking up

― mh, Saturday, July 30, 2022 10:43 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

In this ep it's bookended by Nathan feeling bad he didn't get to read a story before bed and then having a mundane conversation afterwards. If you never saw the show and were flipping channels and landed on it during the goodnight-story moment that scene would be horrifying and confusing and it's really funny for me to imagine this happening to someone.

did you keyword search “halloween” and “satanic origins”?

lol

angela sniffing essential oils and then rubbing one directly on her arm was a nice quick shot

Fuck me to tears!

Nathan’s skill at slapstick is underrated. Chasing the chickens in this episode, struggling with the irrigation pipes, etc.

My prediction is “Adam” will be in the show all season and by the final episode he’ll be as old as Nathan

my ex sister in law was very much like Angela; converted evangelical, wanted to live off the land, prohibited her multiple children from celebrating Halloween or reading Harry Potter because it was satanic, expected her husband to work 100 hours a week at a job and at their homestead while she ate painkillers.