It's been a while since I gave a full season a five-star rating, and fittingly, the honor goes to yet another HBO production. It's weird to write a spoiler review for a show that pitches itself as being about Nathan helping other people rehearse hypothetical scenarios on an episodic basis. But, if you're reading this, then you either already know or do not care to be told in advance that this is not what The Rehearsal is. That description is what it starts as, it's likely what HBO and Nathan Fielder wanted it to be, but if anything Nathan talks about in this show is to be believed, there was clearly a deeper reason to all of this that even Nathan himself did not fully understand. 

In episode 2, Nathan helps an aspiring mother rehearse the concept of motherhood, in a recreation of her dream home, with a revolving door of child actors to simulate full days and nights of parenting. And then things take a turn. Nathan wants in. The woman, Angela, clearly did not sign up for this, and it's immediately unnerving because I'm genuinely not sure if Nathan planned this or not. The scheme seems elaborate even by the show's standards, intended to last several months, and probably requiring more money and effort than anything else Nathan tries in the show, so on the one hand, it would make sense if Nathan was consciously planning on dropping this surprise. On the other, there were ways this could have fallen apart before Nathan ever got himself involved, so why not be up-front? Why risk it?

Regardless, this is what the show becomes. This seemingly episodic reality/documentary show now has a running storyline about Nathan co-parenting a fake child with a woman who likely originally only signed on for one episode. And over the course of the show, Nathan is forced to grapple with why he started this show to begin with. Obviously, it was to create these rehearsal scenarios, but why did that appeal to him? On some level, subconsciously, was he always hoping for this to happen? Was he always hoping to rehearse something for himself?

Even the other rehearsals in the show fade into the background, as Nathan tries to connect what he accomplishes in the rehearsals to his new "home life" with Angela and their fake son Adam. Nathan is clearly not doing this just to help Angela with her scenario. It means something to him, too. And not just as a way of making her uncomfortable, like with the various "bits" on Nathan for You. Something deeper is being fulfilled for him. He wants that experience of parenthood, too. 

I don't know much about Nathan Fielder's life outside of this show, I generally think we know more about celebrities' personal lives than we should, but one thing I knew going into this Nathan Fielder binge I've been on is that he is divorced, and a common point of discussion surrounding this show was that his divorce probably influenced the direction of The Rehearsal. And, well, it's pretty clear how. This fake family Nathan has gotten himself tangled up in has given him the opportunity to confront the failures of his past relationship, and perhaps even the life he wanted had things not fallen apart. I cannot speak to the reasons why Nathan Fielder got divorced, I have specifically avoided learning any information about the when or why, or even the who. But it's hard not to see the ways in which Nathan is trying to convey that these experiences are not entirely unfamiliar to him, even if he rarely makes any direct reference to his personal life.

But why do it this way? Why "rehearse"? Why not just go out and date someone else? Something had to make this specific concept appealing. Maybe it was just having the budget to do it, and I imagine that was how Nathan justified it to himself at first. But I think the real reason has to do with how he pitches this concept to his first client, Kor Skeet, in the pilot. He offers him the chance to practice a difficult conversation, to leave no room for error, to always know the right answer to the given situation. Basically, what if he could practice what to do in all the hypothetical scenarios in which this conversation didn't go his way?

It's hard not to relate this to a feeling of social anxiety, with Nathan's "solution" essentially validating the way one can easily get too inside of their own head. To construct their own imagined narrative of how a conversation will go, usually a negative one that encourages one not to try. Nathan basically just offers to throw so many solutions at the problem that it *should* feel impossible to be hit with an outcome that couldn't be anticipated. But as we see in the pilot, things don't go according to plan. Not because the other person reacted in a way that was unpredictable, but Nathan's plan doesn't really address the fact that Kor is too afraid to do his big confession, and that fear isn't entirely rational, isn't something you can plan your way out of. Kor does eventually bring himself to say what he wanted to say, but there's no moment where we're meant to connect this to the plans he hatched with Nathan, instead we're asked to understand that on some level, the only way out of this problem was to face it head-on, and simply shut off the part of his brain that kept telling him how it could go wrong.

The pilot ends on a note that, in some way, reinforces this, albeit in a much more negative context. Nathan rehearses his own confession to Kor about some subterfuge he engaged in for the sake of "helping" Kor achieve his desired outcome, but after being faced with a version of this rehearsed scenario that doesn't go his way, he chickens out, and never tells Kor the truth. Nathan is, in some ways, a victim of the very issue he's trying to fix. The anxiety the show is commenting on is not a problem the methods he built the show around can so easily "solve."

And this is, on some level, what The Rehearsal is really about. It's about how ultimately, all the scenarios your mind can conceive don't really do the heavy lifting required to allow you to face reality. You can tell yourself things will go perfectly, rehearse that perfect scenario, but it won't necessarily give you the courage to do the thing you were rehearsing for. You can't rehearse life. Nothing can actually replace the experience of living it. And that means understanding why you feel so afraid of living it. Indeed, these rehearsals never actually end up solving these people's issues directly, but rather, in living out these fictional scenarios, they gain a greater understanding of what they've actually been looking for this whole time.

So, what has Nathan been searching for? Why did he need this fake family? I don't think we'll ever know exactly, he does not turn to the camera and explain it to us. Again, he keeps his personal life relatively distant from what we see on-screen. But over the course of the show, he is forced to unpack layers of himself, to face challenges he had previously struggled to surmount in the past. And in many ways, he still doesn't surmount them. But perhaps he's gained a better understanding of why. Perhaps this HBO production ended up being little more than an overly expensive alternative to therapy.

It is almost indescribably uncomfortable trying to discern fiction from reality in this show. The entire "rehearsal" is inherently fictional, obviously, but something real is being gained from it. The artificiality of it melts away as Nathan starts forming real bonds and having real arguments in the midst of what is supposed to be a fake family. It feels violating, like I should be terrified for the people involved that they've been roped into fulfilling this man's fantasy. But within that, we get one of the most fascinating portraits of anxiety ever put to screen. I've never seen the phenomenon of replaying scenarios in one's head, both as a way of preparing for the future, but also as a way of dealing with guilt from the past, so viscerally depicted before because there hasn't ever been anything like this show before. It was upsetting on a personal level to me even though I had never gone through anything like the specific scenarios depicted on-screen.

If Nathan for You was being unethical to be funny, The Rehearsal was being unethical to reveal something. To its guests, to its audience, and to its host. Even though there are moments that are supposed to invoke the same kind of cringe comedy as Nathan for You, the "comedy" is gone. You're forced to consider the real, psychological consequences of what Nathan has done. You have to grapple with the idea that there's no such thing as true "fiction." The creation of art, even the creation of fiction, requires bringing parts of ourselves to the table. And in turn, that art affects us, shapes us, and changes the way we see the world. In other words, we create our own reality.

Favorite episode: Pretend Daddy