The Rehearsal - Nathan Fielder - HBO

there's a lot of strong competition for most cuckoo, but finding an Angela in the PNW is definitely a shade easier

It is in PNW. Looks like Clackamas County. When he gets ghosted by Patrick, he is at Oaks Amusement Park in SE Portland.

I heard Nathan rebuilt that entire amusement park in a soundstage, just for that scene.

what am i watching

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Friday, July 29, 2022 11:43 PM (one week ago) bookmarkflaglink

inception

okay, four episodes in i think its pretty clear that this show is "about" mental illness

the slide is possibly the best special effect of the year
having read a lot about this show, i think we're past the part the critics have seen and absolutely anything could happen next.

I think that’s definitely one of the things it’s about.

I especially loved when things got deep with the acting class. just brilliant

that playground bit at the end of the episode was quite the “..but the show must go on!” moment

i can't believe he went through with going back to 6 years old.

there were definitely points in this episode though where I thought Angela may be acting this part.

when he decided to go back to age 6, i really thought it would be building up with a weird confrontation with the actor playing the son, in that the actor would feel rebuked by fielder (the creator of the show), like he got a chance to show his acting chops as a kid who was emotionally traumatized by the absence of his father for 9 years, and then suddenly nathan decides to go back to age 6. it might feel, to the 15-year-old actor who was kind of getting excited about developing his ideas about the character, like he had fielder down in some way. i don't know. the way they sent him off with the slide special FX (which will definitely win an emmy for fx) was so good!

many typos and words mysteriously missing; also this show is reaaaaaaally hard to talk about, lol

i knew the slide shot was coming, but it was still great

plus the button at the end with the teenage actor crawling out of the top lol

After watching the first episode I can see that the nnecessary background work and preparation is verging on fantasy.
How long does anybody involved have to be working through possibilities when they need to be working etc etc.
& building mock up versions of buildings etc seems to be beyond reality. Budget must be crazy and apparently endless.
So idea of veracity must be challenged logically. Ive skipped the thread after first episode hoping to catch up. But this just can't be real.very interesting concept though.
I'm reminded of the Trump show but that had an army of preparation staff didn't it. Seems like there would be layers on top of layers here if it was even approaching how it's represented in the end show. How infinite can a budget be.
Also how spontaneous can anything shown be.
How many people seen are not scripted or improvising within parameter actors.
Wow, like mind blowing innit.

the most unbelievable thing about Angela so far is cutting spaghetti to see if it's done

Nathan walking in on a sixteen-year-old Adam was the hardest I've laughed in a while. Until Adam went down the slide and I laughed until I almost passed out.

i haven't bought angela as real since her first appearance tbh but i've moved to the camp that questioning the verisimilitude of the show feels like its missing the point .

My wife described this most recent episode as a bad nightmare.

The acting class part or the teenage son part? Both equally plausible haha

The whole thing! Whatever it even is!

the music when he goes into thomas’ apartment leading to the pokemon punchline was so unnerving

Thomas’ apartment, the 5 minutes including that, after it, and before it - that zone - that was incredible

the actor playing nathan seemed to do everything right but was missing something ineffable lol

Feeling the "bad nightmare" vibe this episode, with the levels of recreation, but still very onboard

the simulacrum of the apartment that was a simulacrum of an apartment was… wow

nathan’s thomas wig was really something

Appreciated the way he signaled without spelling it out that Nathan’s house was not his house. “My TV. My marble coffee table. My black and white toilet.

One of the planning conversations I would have liked to have heard is when they decided to reference this movie.

The Rehearsal pic.twitter.com/bRHmEK5hTP

— 𝔯𝔦𝔠𝔥 (@birthdayrich) August 6, 2022

Incidentally, the paramedics that came to help Adam at the end were two of the actors from his Los Angeles acting class, which means he flew them up for the shoot. Is this the first time we've seen actors from one segment crossover to another segment?

Also, Angela ... even if she's "real" she can't be real, can she? At least no more than any other actor hired to play a role? She is so unflappable and serene in this surreal situation that I can only assume her patience is linked to a paycheck. Has she even left the house yet? How long has she been in the house? Has she (or any of them) actually spent the night in the house, or is it all a fictionalized scenario? Which ... I mean, of course it is, from the cameras to the countdown clock to switching out the kids, every minute of this situation had to have been thought about in advance, which is very thematically on point, which is to say, suspicious. But to what end? Each episode gets more and more twisted up in itself. This most recent one is, of course, the one most about the divide between acting and literal/emotional truth. But in a sense, hasn't every episode been about that? I recently rewatched "Smokers Allowed," and the "I love you" scene ... are we watching the transformation of acting into truth? Or is that just what all good acting is?

Was this ever posted here?

Okay, let me expand on that. So this is what it was like to be on Nathan For You.

— Victoria Lynn (@incertaspecie) September 2, 2019

Loved the entire concept of him being away for his other project for a few days and then working that into the parenthood project by making him a deadbeat dad who hasn’t seen his son in nine years and the resulting “troubled adolescent” life this kid’s now living. This show’s really developed into something brilliant. Impressed by how it folds poignancy into these totally absurd situations.

So many lols at Nathan living as the actor. The clothes, the wig, the seemingly painted on five o’clock shadow. There are a lot of quick shots in this show with funny details in them that can be easy to miss, makes me want to rewatch.

That slide scene alone was one of the single most delightful things I’ve seen on TV in a long time.

I will co-sign that Angela as a type is 100% real and I believe that’s really her. She is acting to a certain extent as she is someone who signed up for a “reality show” and there’s always a level of performance involved. The quirks of some of these people seem entirely too real to be invented whole cloth.

I’m on the side that the details of behind the scene “real v. scripted” stuff aren’t worth getting caught up on. The show is about the merging of the two and I’m sure these things intertwined in varying ways while making it.

I’m on the side that the details of behind the scene “real v. scripted” stuff aren’t worth getting caught up on. The show is about the merging of the two and I’m sure these things intertwined in varying ways while making it.

Heavy otm

as a person who lives about 20 minutes away from where they shot the “homesteading” stuff and just south of portland let me tell you, I meet about four Angelas a week

a woman named Allison came into my work last weekend and wouldn’t stop hugging me and crying about the beauty of my aura. sure she was a little tipsy and I was like “okay” but it also wasn’t out of this world unusual

I can totally see that she's real, but there are always two realities. There's Angela, as she is in real life, and there's Angela, who was cast in this show to be a certain person (who happens to be who she might really be). But just like Adam, he's his son, but Nathan (or "Nathan") tells him his reaction to his return after 9 years is not realistic. So Adam gives a more "realistic" performance ... by doing what Nathan tells him to do, down to a scripted overdose and rescue by EMTs, which is of course ridiculous. The more Nathan works to make something "real" the less real it really is. Which is why I wonder about Angela. She can be both real and playing a character based on who she really is, and Nathan is not above telling people how to behave or what to say. And there are of course specific shots and scenes in the show that had to be pre-planned, which begs the question: what else is pre-planned? Which even asking the question is convoluted, because of course *everything* is pre-planned to an extent! It's a TV show, with cast, crew and writers. That's true of lots of reality shows, but this one seems to be *about* the fiction, the artifice, rather pretending said artifice does not exists, like so-called "reality" shows tend to play it. That it's about the fiction in service and search of some unattainable "truth" just adds another layer. Like acting, which Nathan explicitly addresses in this ep, does playing pretend make the truth achieved any less authentic, and less real? It's fascinating.

It's kind of like what Springsteen calls his "magic trick" #onethread

Naturally it was a pre-planned gag, but the extent to which Angela's child-rearing experiment has been completely hijacked by Nathan to suit his own needs is just the funniest thing. I think he clearly wants her to react to that in some way but she's totally locked into 'if just I go with the flow, I will be a reality star' mode.

Which of course gets back to the is it/how scripted nature of it. To suit Nathan's needs? "Nathan's" needs? The needs of the character? The needs of the show? Is there a pre-devised end in mind? I guess we'll find out. Is Angela not reacting to her prompts because of who she is, or because of who she has been told to be, just as "Adam" reacted "wrong" at first, too, until Nathan redirected him.

Angela so far has played a tiny part of this, tbh. What does she do all day? It looks like she's always working on Tik Tok dances. Also wondering, practically/legally speaking, did she have to be vaccinated for the production? Because she seems like the sort that would not be.

as a person who lives about 20 minutes away from where they shot the “homesteading” stuff and just south of portland let me tell you, I meet about four Angelas a week

― Clay, Sunday, August 7, 2022 1:12 PM (one hour ago)

Yep, good old Clackamas County (Gladstone resident here). I don't recall if Angela is local though or if they flew her in for the show.

I feel like a big meta-moment (in a show full of them) was during the acting workshop when Nathan, playing the actor (Tom?), is given the waiver by the actor-Nathan that he has to sign, and he effectively says, "who reads this shit" and just signs it. It's a commentary about how Nathan gets people to participate on the show.

I liked this piece by Isaac Butler (author of a recent book about the history of method acting): https://slate.com/culture/2022/08/the-rehearsal-episode-4-nathan-fielder-hbo-max.html

That - and showing the cameras, and inhabiting the mindset of an aspiring actor trying to work out WTF was going on but not wanting to fuck up an opportunity- was the strongest part of the ep IMO - kind of reverberated though the rest of those scenes and others…

…and then having those actors playing paramedics at the end was some kind of weirdly moving emotional payoff - and maybe that is one version of what this show does that is great? Show us weird refracted versions of our lives and choices, in a way that amazingly lets us see/feel very familiar situations from a unique new perspective?

Xp, that was

xp thanks jaymc, that was great

The other amazing meta-moment was how the use of Patrick's grandfather backstory to improve his rehearsal was doubled by the attempted use of Angela's drug use backstory though the introduction of Adam's drug use. I assume this didn't really have the same effect on Angela or they wouldn't have had to de-age Adam, but who knows.

One thing I noticed is that the first episode was filmed in 2019 (according to Tricia’s blog) and the other ones were probably filmed a year or two later, judging by the presence of a masked up crew in some scenes. So the trivia episode was the pilot sold to HBO, while what we’re seeing from Episode 2 on was the show Nathan actually wanted to make. This was probably obvious to everyone else but I just realized it now

it def feels to me like 'assembled', similar to how 'how to w/ john wilson' is -filmed pieces stitched together that support a storyline -- like i truly doubt the time nathan spends away in la doing the acting workshop or the time he runs thru the raising cains scenario w/ that dude corresponds linearly to time he's away from the house and angela

also there is nothing funnier to me than reading & re-reading this part of the wiki recap from ep 2

Seeking a simulated husband, Angela dates Robbin, a numerology-obsessed man who wants to have sex with Angela despite her devout Christian beliefs against premarital sex. When Robbin quits the project due to the robot baby's incessant crying, Nathan inserts himself into the experiment as Angela's non-romantic co-parent.

Reading the plot laid out like that evokes a non-fictional Sex House.

“hbo cameras”

lol, "Sex House" was ahead of its time.

Describing most of these episodes to someone makes them seem particularly nightmarish.