Nathan Fielder’s newest television show, The Rehearsal—which was renewed for a second season at the recent close of its dizzying six-episode run on HBO—is a true comedy, in the sense that it’s really a tragedy. A deeply funny show wrapped around a startling core of sadness, The Rehearsal sets its sights on the tangled notion that the more we instrumentalize or attempt to control the world, the more the reality of that world and those in it seems to escape us. This is not a novel concern: historians and philosophers have long argued over whether reality’s recession, as the flip side of individuals’ growing alienation from lived experience, dates from the Industrial Revolution, the Reformation, or some other, earlier event. But The Rehearsal’s dizzyingly sharp take on the issue reveals the extremity and particularly of the problem in the contemporary moment, shaped as it is by a profusion of instrumentalizations so simultaneously minute and expansive that we don’t even wonder anymore over the belief that everything—including ourselves—should fall under our own totalizing control, and thus our totalizing responsibility, and thus our totalizing guilt.
As in Fielder’s previous show, the cult hit (which ran from 2013 to 2017 on Comedy Central), such control is here personified in ’s central character, Fielder himself. While Fielder’s persona is a little calmer and looser this time around, the basic parts remain: “Nathan” is a megalomaniac who had Fielder offering ludicrous plans to small business owners with the purported aim of helping them survive their inevitable demise at the hands of corporate America, finds him offering others the chance to influence their own lives, in the same way that Nathan wants to manipulate his (and theirs): by “rehearsing” life events in advance, “writing” those events by enacting the scenarios dozens of times in concert with actors playing the participants’ friends and family, on perfectly reproduced sets that, in a running gag, Fielder and Co. can’t get enough of spending HBO’s money on.