The Rehearsal - Nathan Fielder - HBO

He's still got it

I was scream laughing at [show hidden text]

― Kompakt Total Landscaping (Will M.), Saturday, July 16, 2022 3:20 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Spoiler tagging because I think I'd be more mad about this show getting spoiled than any twisty scifi whatever type show

― Kompakt Total Landscaping (Will M.), Saturday, July 16, 2022 3:22 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

this was amazing & this gave me anxiety

― johnny crunch, Saturday, July 16, 2022 8:00 AM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

what a joy.

there is nothing like this show

― sean gramophone, Saturday, July 16, 2022 9:50 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

yeah I was in heaven watching this

― Clay, Saturday, July 16, 2022 9:56 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

ok i will be the guy who asks

[show hidden text]

[show hidden text]

― the life of a rebo band is always intense (emsworth), Saturday, July 16, 2022 10:57 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i feel like with "exploitation" i really want to be able to understand the harm being done: a harm beyond being embarrassed after the fact about something you understood and agreed to

i don't think these people are mocked; i think they seem human and complicated. i agree that it "uses" other people to achieve its ends, but there's a matter of degree here, and with this first episode it doesn't feel abusive. an improv show that invites a volunteer on stage (and then does something silly with them) isn't necessarily "exploitation" - although it can still be mean or embarrass about the volunteer.

if trish was mistreated over the course of this production - if she felt deceived, etc - then she'd be right to be angry and fielder would be obliged to respond to this. but with a lot of art i think that's the extent of the moral obligation: to try not to do harm; to face those who feel harm was done, if that's the case, and respond in good faith to their complaints. but you don't have a moral obligation to "avoid any circumstance where someone might feel bad."

i say this as a novelist who has used real people in his work

― sean gramophone, Saturday, July 16, 2022 11:05 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

if there is a novel about a jerk, and it becomes known that the character was inspired by a real person, the author may have a responsibility to deal with that real person face to face. but they don't have an obligation not to write that book.

― sean gramophone, Saturday, July 16, 2022 11:07 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

bad nathan friend

― Guayaquil (eephus!), Saturday, July 16, 2022 11:22 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

Xp thanks for this response Sean G, that’s really interesting - esp “avoid any circumstance where people might feel bad”, which I must admit I try to do myself! there’s something about the power imbalance between someone with access to massive budget and broadcast distribution apparatus - and people who don’t! that makes me wary. i think people often enter into relationships with media without really understanding the implications of what it means to surrender their story to an edit process.

your example of writing novels is interesting, would you agree tho that maybe there is a difference when someone is presented in a certain way in a heavily constructed “reality” show?

[show hidden text]

― the life of a rebo band is always intense (emsworth), Saturday, July 16, 2022 11:43 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

I’m not a tv insider but I always take it as a given that any time I see someone’s face & hear their voice in a show like this (i.e. not the news) they have agreed in writing and been paid at least a nominal sum

― nobody like my rap (One Eye Open), Sunday, July 17, 2022 12:45 AM (twelve hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

i was more wondering if they showed her the cut before she signed! btw of course i do think she actually comes across really well when it counts - but definitely interested in these considerations around agency and representation.

― the life of a rebo band is always intense (emsworth), Sunday, July 17, 2022 1:14 AM (eleven hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

https://thriftyboy.org

yes, the "stories" look hilarious but don't miss the iStock watermarks on all the preview photos

― Murgatroid, Sunday, July 17, 2022 9:53 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

this was staggeringly impressive, i couldn't believe they spend the money on the bar set.

― akm, Sunday, July 17, 2022 11:19 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

sorry that the hidden text links dont carry over, i rehearsed how starting this would go and didnt account for that

well, we really need a rehearsal board for you to try threads like this

this was great, so excited to see more. the very end was pretty shocking to me, but maybe predictable in hindsight that he would get so upset

wasn’t that a rehearsal with the other guy, and then we didn’t see the actual guy getting told?

Yeah that was the actor. I don’t think the real guy would care that much. I was wondering if he was gonna figure out during trivia what was happening but I don’t think he did. Either way the scene where he’s unknowingly being fed the answers was as funny as anything NFY did, pretty much worth the whole episode

Also lmao @ him not knowing what Nathan For You was, and Nathan going “oh, I thought you were supposed to be a TV trivia guy”

Yeah my original Hidden text was the cop cursing the day the Chinese invented gunpowder, that line ruined me

building the exact replica of the bar was insane. I'd watch a little documentary on that aspect alone

think it bodes well for what the HBO budget is gonna allow them to do

lol whoops. I guess the actor was too convincing

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 read anything about it yet but I imagine this was a particularly arduous show to finish after COVID. The Cheap Chick in the City blog posts Nathan looks at were all from 2019.

Both of the actors were fantastic at capturing their respective subjects.

NGL, this kinda got me emotional at points. It's an insane concept built for max laffs while also addressing some deeper shit. It's basically exposure therapy taken to the most ridiculous extreme.

feels like this show is gonna be “finding frances: the series,” and yeah, sign me up

The character detail on just the few seconds of Thrifty Boy, with him snacking on packets of ketchup…

I would really like to see that insane flow chart they made

https://pyxis.nymag.com/v1/imgs/9e4/695/487767ff5901db3cbe83303c942e373672-the-rehearsal-ep1.rsquare.w330.jpghttps://64.media.tumblr.com/08d6c9fe2aeec7c979563473924bf015/042f003c17c0df93-1f/s1280x1920/7ea103a34e83a9fff4873364f838f99e062ab6c7.jpg

some Redditor was actually on Cash Cab with this guy a decade ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BADGSUbWfMk

they were part of a trivia team. and yes, he did tell him he had a Masters

(amusingly it seems Cash Cab is also fake - it's a real game show but they don't just pick people up off the street)

“His whole educational status has been a scam.” pic.twitter.com/Zgse9B8jCg

— Scout Tafoya (@Honors_Zombie) July 19, 2022

(amusingly it seems Cash Cab is also fake - it's a real game show but they don't just pick people up off the street)

can confirm

https://www.vulture.com/article/nathan-fielder-the-rehearsal-alligator-lounge-visit.html

My friend Danny showed up, and I asked him what he thought of the episode. He said that in the first scene at the real Alligator Lounge, when it looks as if there are hidden cameras scoping it out, he recognized regulars in the crowd, including one of his friends. And here’s where the plot thickens: Danny said that in the climactic scene in which Kor and Tricia actually do bar trivia, he “didn’t recognize anyone. Even the bartender was different.” Danny said the trivia host in the episode wasn’t the usual guy who hosted in 2019, either. To be clear, Danny is a true Alligator Lounge regular. He knows the space; he knows the crowd. He believed that the confession scene, the one that was supposed to be the “real” moment after many, many staged ones, was more staged than the show let on. He also directed me to a post on the Instagram account of Trivial Dispute, the group that organizes these bar-trivia nights. Overlaid on a screengrab of the episode were the words “AS (SORT OF) SEEN ON THE REHEARSAL! ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTIONS!”

I reached out via Instagram to Adam Kesner, the man behind Trivial Dispute, which hosts a number of trivia nights in bars across New York throughout the week; the group has run the program at Alligator Lounge since 2007. Kesner usually writes the questions every week but confirmed that a different host and pre-written questions were provided by The Rehearsal’s production company for the final trivia night in the episode. “The only issue I had with the show was the subpar question quality,” said Kesner, who theorized that the questions were written to generate those funny “clue inception” beats rather than a challenging night of real-life bar trivia.

layers within layers

Starting to think "Nathan Fielder" is himself an elaborate ruse.

I guess we could still get

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

This was nuts

Early in the show the guy showed a photo of the whole trivia team, which looked like a typical,uh, size of one of those. Why would this night have been only the two of them?

the gunpowder thing, the answer was gunpowder, not China. How the heck was that question phrased?

he tells nathan early on that he'll invite her to a two-person trivia night with the excuse that they haven't hung out together in awhile or something xp

per the earlier writeup, I'm thinking the two person trivia night is an invention of the show!

i shouldn't have phrased it that way -- it's not that the bar is hosting only teams of two, it's just that their team will just be the two of them for that night

We saw how seriously they all take it. The others are just going to sit one out? I don't think so. Whatever you have to say, you can say it to all of us

I assumed it wasn't their regular night, this was some bonus night at a different bar than usual?

Nathan Fielder is clearly a genius.

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

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.

the story with Patrick was kind of upsetting, really. I want to know if he wound up getting his money off his brother.

in my elementary school in the late 80s a large group of parents tried to ban any mention of halloween, i assume it was late-stage satanic panic. a compromise was reached where halloween was allowed but any 'supernatural' references were prohibted (ghosts, witches, graves). a lot of kids and teachers ended up wearing sports equipment, it was very strange and confusing for a little kid.

https://i.imgur.com/bON5mPb.png
https://i.imgur.com/16NiSy8.png
https://i.imgur.com/y2rLK5w.png

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.

― Lavator Shemmelpennick, Saturday, 30 July 2022 03:34 (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Do watch the OG if you can

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Review_with_Myles_Barlow

That one sounds like a literal take on the Nathan Barley subplot where the journalist goes "stray for pay" and jerks off a builder in order to write about it

Digital aging mirror so creepy

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

Or the adult child Adam will BE played by Nathan

akm how did your brother let a catch like that get away xp

I have no idea what I am watching. It's teetering on the precipice of profound, but could just as easily tip some other direction.

Nathan doesn’t know either

I suspect he *does* know, but he has such a poker face that he's not going to give it away (or is editing out tells).

Like, how much time *is* he spending in that house with that woman and the kid(s). How much time is *she* spending in the house? Does she go anywhere? Has it been days? A week? How many perfect replica bars/restaurants/whatever do you think Nathan has built on soundstages? And, like, seeing the sticker on the pepper, that was clearly a set up, because the shots had to be blocked, which is to say, written/directed. So no doubt other stuff has been thought out, too, but the potential how and why of it is fascinating.

Fave detail from this most recent one was an extra pretending to eat chicken fingers.

"akm how did your brother let a catch like that get away xp"

it's my wife's brother actually and he is also a moron who got semi-evangelical with her, they had a ton of kids, even though they kept getting in fights, and he kept leaving her. they eventually divorced. both of them suck.

Just wanted to give a shout-out to Nathan Fielder for deciding to film this in the PNW where the country's most cuckoo people live.

You assume it's the PNW, it might just be a giant field in Ireland with a huge digital backdrop.

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.

most of my friends have opted out of this show with episode three, finding it too uncomfortable and mean. my friends are pussies.

I want the wife to watch this with me so bad but she hates cringe humor but this is so good and so much more than that.

Yeah, as usual I have been unsuccessful in getting anyone I know to care about it. It’s really hard to explain, and I think it all just translates as “oh, it’s Nathan fielder making everyone feel weird again”. Which it is, but so much more

i was watching and my wife walked in and asked "is this a documentary?" and i had no idea how to answer lol

Is this even meant to be a comedy? At this point I really don't think so. That's why I don't buy into the sudden "Nathan is mean" discourse. Sure, "Nathan for You" was more often than not made to be funny, sometimes seemingly at the expense of others (sort of, and with the occasional redemptive dip into existential profundity), but this? There's really not much funny about it, imo. If anything it underscores that life is inherently funny because it's so weird and strange and unexpected, but that's very different from comedy. Unless we're talking about it in the Dantean sense.

Is this even meant to be a comedy?

ymmv but i find all of this deeply, deeply funny, every episode, nearly every minute of it

but i also think, as you mention, that life itself is deeply weird and strange. life itself isn't always funny. but the rehearsal is deeply weird, strange, and also very much funny on purpose. i don't know how else to describe the scene where the crew half-buried a bunch of vegetables clearly bought from the supermarket in the garden, and watching Angela harvest them with not a little bit of satisfaction

Nathan himself also has this fumbling, Chaplinesque quality that makes nearly every scene he's in funny (to me, at least).

good question but yeah, I think it is, I mean inventing this convoluted scenario where you 'speedrun' parenting a child by having him age rapidly and then have him act resentful because Fielder's weeklong vacation to do a different segment for the show means he missed the kid's entire childhood, resulting in him getting into drugs and overdosing is really fucking funny

that said I do think there's obviously something else going on here, maybe not an attempt to be especially profound but at least an attempt to do something that's never really been done before. I got the same feeling with How To With John Wilson, idk how to describe that show either cuz there's nothing else like it. I wonder if people felt that way with Seinfeld when they started doing the "sitcom about nothing" plot. to me Nathan Fielder (along with guys like Tim Heidecker) are a very modern form of comedian in that they play around in that space of what really is acting/performance art/comedy. I think it speaks a lot to my generation which has always lived in this world where pretty much everything you see is staged - not just TV and movies but also advertising, social media, etc. - everything is meant to convey something but none of it is real, exactly.

that's what I appreciated so much about the first episode (and a lot of NFY stuff) - who knows what & how much the real Kor & Tricia were told to do but their interactions felt very real in a way you almost never see in a TV show. By which I mean their minds were always kind of somewhere else, which is how people actually act. Whereas the actors were always very pointed in what they were trying to convey. that said the subsequent episodes, especially this last one, were way more fascinating in my book

like with Tim Heidecker I'm not even referring to stuff like On Cinema, which of course is hilarious and gloriously meta in its own way, but rather like Tim & Eric doing all the infomercial parody stuff. obviously every sketch comedy show does some sort of funny commercial bit, but the premises is usually something like "what if the product was really dumb". whereas Tim & Eric got what was really funny about infomercials - all these people who never acted before in their life trying to express emotions that are wildly inappropriate for the scene & all these bizarre turns of phrase that no human would ever use. it wasn't 'lets make a funny commerical' its 'lets do something funny with all the contrived constraints that TV commercials have to force themselves into'. this show definitely uses that style of humor.

this world where pretty much everything you see is staged - not just TV and movies but also advertising, social media, etc.

and also, that during our lifetimes (i think i'm a few days younger than fielder), a style of "reality" started getting mapped onto all of that. "reality tv", of course, which is very staged, but also advertising and the way that corporations and the "world" writ large has adjusted itself to try to be more "real". i am not equipped to type this post right now, sorry. but hopefully someone knows what i mean

maybe another way of putting it is that the fakeness of tv has a lot in common with the fakeness of reality, more so each day. i'm not sure which direction it's flowing, but the world is infused with artificiality, and not only that, but nodding in the direction of that same fakeness as well and acknowledging it, and carrying on doing more or less the same thing. (on my very negative days i feel this way about social media and what i do on it).

and then having those actors playing paramedics at the end

WAIT what, the EMTs who rescue overdosing teen Adam are the actors from the Fielder Method school???? Missed this entirely.

Is this even meant to be a comedy?

Yes, but in the same sense that, like, Samuel Beckett is comedy (which it is)

I want the wife to watch this with me so bad but she hates cringe humor

Same. But she has some background in acting so I might be able to get her back in with ep 4.

like with Tim Heidecker I'm not even referring to stuff like On Cinema, which of course is hilarious and gloriously meta in its own way, but rather like Tim & Eric doing all the infomercial parody stuff. obviously every sketch comedy show does some sort of funny commercial bit, but the premises is usually something like "what if the product was really dumb". whereas Tim & Eric got what was really funny about infomercials - all these people who never acted before in their life trying to express emotions that are wildly inappropriate for the scene & all these bizarre turns of phrase that no human would ever use. it wasn't 'lets make a funny commerical' its 'lets do something funny with all the contrived constraints that TV commercials have to force themselves into'. this show definitely uses that style of humor.

― frogbs, Monday, 8 August 2022 16:33 (twenty minutes ago) link

As Odenkirk said - T&E had a fresh perspective via parodying the medium itself

"WAIT what, the EMTs who rescue overdosing teen Adam are the actors from the Fielder Method school???? Missed this entirely."

yeah. their faces are only shown briefly but long enough for it to be clear if you're eagle-eyed

Maybe I just pay special attention to faces in general but it felt kind of hard to miss! Because it wasn't just anyone from the class as the paramedic, it was Thomas.

and also, that during our lifetimes (i think i'm a few days younger than fielder), a style of "reality" started getting mapped onto all of that. "reality tv", of course, which is very staged, but also advertising and the way that corporations and the "world" writ large has adjusted itself to try to be more "real". i am not equipped to type this post right now, sorry. but hopefully someone knows what i mean

― Bruce Stingbean (Karl Malone), Monday, August 8, 2022 11:36 AM (forty-five minutes ago) bookmarkflaglink

ya I definitely know what you mean, specifically when it comes to advertising. the style of ads I grew up with was people receiving a flame-grilled Whopper and acting like they'd just witnessed the birth of their first child. women taking a swig of Coke and exuding this expression of pure joy and wonder. it was obviously all so fake and easy to make fun of but at least the parameters of the ad were very clear; e.g. in a McDonalds commercial everyone is hungry, McDonalds is the only food there is, and everyone loves it. whereas now commercials really do try to make a quote-unquote "human" connection which all feels very manipulative and fake; best example right now are all those insurance commercials which are maybe funny enough to be B-level SNL skits but are really just about themselves - like this Geico ad in which the gecko, who was introduced years ago as a marketing ploy, is in the office, trying to come up with a new advertising slogan, as if the company is saying "you know we all hate insurance commercials, but we're gonna run 'em anyway, so we're going to appear like we're on your side"...its like all the kids who grew up with insane Ronald McDonald shit started thinking seriously about what kind of advertisement would actually feel "real". and of course the joke is now that everything is so meta and self-referencing these days that nothing's actually real anymore. the Progressive Lady is a thing because they worked from the ground up to make it a thing. and now all their ads are about how everyone loves that thing. which in itself is a commentary on how advertisements are a natural part of our lives now, same as wind and thunder.

I feel like this is maybe Gen X's fault.

I definitely thought the full-grown veggies were funny, though maybe absurd is a better word. But they were also the set-up to Nathan seeing the sticker on the pepper on the counter later, and that wasn't played for laughs, necessarily. The pepper reveal comes when Nathan is monologuing about the limits of control, about how there will always be things you overlook (in the show, in life). Which is of course another meta joke, since his crew put the pepper there and made sure the sticker was facing out so that he would see it, which of course he would, because it was *written and designed to be seen*. So kind of like Adam in the next episode, in pursuit of "reality" Nathan sets up something that's completely planned, which of course simultaneously affirms his theme and subverts his point.

Earlier this summer I came across a description of "The Cherry Orchard" as a comedy, and I briefly went down a rabbit hole: wait, is it a comedy? Am I misremembering it? Doesn't it end pretty terribly for many (all?) involved? And indeed, it turns out there is something to this. Citing Wiki for expediency:

Chekhov originally intended the play as a comedy (indeed, the title page of the work refers to it as such), and in letters noted that it is, in places, almost farcical. When he saw the original Moscow Art Theatre production directed by Konstantin Stanislavski, he was horrified to find that the director had moulded the play into a tragedy. Ever since that time, productions have had to struggle with this dual nature of the play (and of Chekhov's works in general).

The play opened on 17 January 1904, the director's birthday, at the Moscow Art Theatre under the direction of the actor-director Konstantin Stanislavski. During rehearsals, the structure of Act Two was re-written. Famously contrary to Chekhov's wishes, Stanislavski's version was, by and large, a tragedy. Chekhov disliked the Stanislavski production intensely, concluding that Stanislavski had "ruined" his play. In one of many letters on the subject, Chekhov would complain, "Anya, I fear, should not have any sort of tearful tone... Not once does my Anya cry, nowhere do I speak of a tearful tone, in the second act there are tears in their eyes, but the tone is happy, lively. Why did you speak in your telegram about so many tears in my play? Where are they? ... Often you will find the words "through tears," but I am describing only the expression on their faces, not tears..."

I guess reality TV is a much more apt comparison than commercials - I remember a time when these shows at least *tried* to pretend they were real but they certainly don't anymore. When someone points out the fakeness of reality TV it feels like all those who got their kicks by telling people that professional wrestling wasn't real. If you actually watch WWE Raw you can tell pretty damn quickly that they aren't pretending otherwise. And reality TV itself right now is very much in the same boat, if you watch The Bachelorette they don't really make a secret out of how contrived and silly everything is. But at the end of the day these people really do get married, same as how pro wrestlers really are getting hit with chairs and Real Housewives actually are going to jail for tax fraud. And there's a whole generation of YouTubers and Tiktokers living the same way, their whole lives revolve around making well-rehearsed 'content' but it's not fake, exactly, because that's who they are. They're content creators.

The most apt example of this of course is Donald Trump, arguably the worst businessman America ever produced, who nevertheless was so good at getting his name out there that he was actually able to become a success via a reality TV show in which he **played** a successful businessman, which as we know now he very much wasn't. He then used that platform to position himself into the Republican nominee for President, despite the fact that he was a lifelong Democrat, whose entire platform was whatever drew him the most applause and media engagement. Which led to shit like "build the wall" becoming an actual, expensive policy position, instead of the idiotic joke that it originally was. In the last episode of NFY there's a bit where Nathan says he "can't see" Trump ever becoming President because he doesn't think anyone would take him seriously, but the Bill Gates impersonator - a guy who was willing to do and say whatever he had to in order to be on TV - thinks Trump is a sure thing. And he turns out to be right! That's what 'reality' is right now! And it sucks big time!

(see also: the Alex Jones case)

I think you can argue that the "reality" in reality television really exists in the moments where the premise breaks down or the cast acknowledges the existence of the fourth wall. I don't think The Rehearsal is unique in this, but it's a reality show about creating a reality show, and Nathan doesn't break the fourth wall in his "rehearsals" as much as he just walks in and out through it.

Going full inception and becoming one of his actors studio characters just makes it into a series of boxes within boxes

A lot like a bar or chicken restaurant inside a warehouse, really

I think it goes one step further, because it's not just a reality show about creating a reality show, it's about creating a reality that is better - or perhaps more "real" - that the real reality!

(than)

I really liked that they seemed to flirt with the possibility that Nathan would be in so deep that he would forget who he was when he was inhabiting Thomas. It seemed like they might be going there at least.

i feel like i am enjoying this show wrong. years of watching wrestling has forced me to learn how to shut off the "is this a work or a shoot" part of my brain because it takes away from that. but it seems like based on the convos here that really trying to separate work from shoot is the fun of it. i was doing that a bit in the first ep but by the second, i just fully decided to accept it all as "what's on the tv" and it's making it a more passive experience. i might just have to watch everything that aired so far again and look for the cracks in the facade.

It's also a kind of absurd autofiction, like a funhouse Knausgaard or How Should a Person Be?

Schrodinger's Reality Show - You don't know it's real or not until you watch it (and maybe not even then).

well sure, that's the subtext of all these actors he's hiring to play specific people - they speak clearly, their conversations are focused, they tell you straight up what they're feeling - real people don't really act like that

which is why I loved the teen actor going "look who decided to show up" - there's no way an actual teenager would say that in that situation. but its exactly what an actor would come up with

Speaking for myself I'm just along for the ride. I'm not distracted about whether Angela or Thomas etc are 100% unscripted or not. It's just a hilarious never ending unfolding paper fortune teller sequence.

feels very Synechdoche New York to me

I thought Thomas Nathan had kind of a Wham era George Michael vibe

the other bit about reality television is nearly everyone who is on it at this point has watched reality tv before

there was an anecdote I'd read about one of the cast from the very first season of The Real World questioning someone from a later season about how real events were. to them, certain interactions were authentic on their own season because they'd happened organically (or at least as organic as anything can be on reality tv). but when a similar situation happened in a later season, they wondered if people were doing a bit based on what they'd seen before

which is funny because a lot of human interactions are definitely not unique and our lives have a lot of repetition. or maybe we're just living out minor variations of the same existence. who knows?

xp it's the hair and makeup, for sure

Yeah reality shows always have predictable beats to the way conversations / arguments play out. At a certain point, the people on the shows (""actors"") start to just play the part and the editors don't have to work quite as hard- oop wait never mind all reality shows are 100% scripted

The ancestor of a lot of reality shows, The Real World, notoriously messed with their own formula to change it from a bunch of people living in the same place to a bunch of people living and working together on a shared task in order to keep everything focused on the group.

I never watched the show until much later having not had MTV, but by the third season at latest there were people "doing reality show stuff" off the bat. The newer shows that have the same cast for multiple seasons are basically nightmares, because there's no way the people on them have not watched episodes of their own show between seasons, right? I'm blissfully unaware here, but have there been scenes on any of them where the people watch their own show?

Watching and reacting to their own shows was very much a thing on Terrace House

Still lolling at "you're a fucking disaster, my guy"

feels very Synechdoche New York to me

yes, feels very like a Kaufmann script but instead of a movie it's reality tv

If this starts at the pilot and goes onto the end of the series getting progressively strange is there further to go for a series 2.
Will people already be aware of it in sufficient numbers to make it more difficult to do, or is its stagedness already rendering that moot.

Interesting comments on the spectacle anyway. & interesting question of time. Like most people live in real time and try to balance out several threads running through their lives don't they? So the amount of time one would commit to spending the time this is suggesting to addressing one part of one's narrative seems to be difficult at least. Like is it suggested that everything else is put on a backburner while this is happening. I do remember a comment about hoping Angela didn't see the move to Oregon as a holiday.

THought the 2ary story in episode 3 was interesting the guy who is roped into helping out an actor playing a fictional grandfather who says he is going to leave some part of a treasure he has helped find. Hope he wasn't banking on that income, I was in the other part of teh room listening to that when the individual disappeared from the rehearsal . Did seem pretty callous and manipulative to have this set up for an emotional reaction Nathan was looking for.
Is this whole series just a set up to talk about ethics involved? & how fictional is Nathan Fielder himself

In addition to Synechdoche NY, watching the latest episode in particular I also found myself thinking of Primer, a movie about people playing doubles of themselves, and doubles of those doubles visiting the same spaces over & over again like lost ghosts, obsessed with recreating the moments in their lives over & over in order to "fix" them, only to find that those recreations are being manipulated by endless layers of doubles who are themselves recreating the lives of other doubles.

Of course the guy who made Primer turned out to be an actual dangerous manipulative psychopath, like the scary non-comedy version of what would happen if the Nathan For You character existed in real life.

"i love the movie Apocalypto"

I really don't know what to do with this

(not a spoiler)
My favorite exchange:
Angela: "And 100 million stood to attend him. His clothing was white as snow. His hair was like the whitest wool."
Nathan: "Whoa."
Angela: "Yeah."

wait do you think that's a reference to the aging mirror???

Was expecting the Curb Your Enthusiasm music at the end there

Of course the guy who made Primer turned out to be an actual dangerous manipulative psychopath, like the scary non-comedy version of what would happen if the Nathan For You character existed in real life.

― nobody like my rap (One Eye Open), Tuesday, 9 August 2022 13:15 (four days ago) bookmarkflaglink

Woah really? Links?

Google him. Arrested for domestic abuse etc

Funny to see him address the "meanness" interpretation of his shows when the Angela actress goes off on him (whose upset dialogue I assume he wrote)

Was expecting the Curb Your Enthusiasm music at the end there

― frogbs, Saturday, August 13, 2022 2:06 AM (nine hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

lol. But "These donuts are delicious" was perfect.

especially if you KNEW she was gonna say "sufganyot" right afterwards

“…and it was cool to own my own bar that HBO paid for”

holy shit that ending

Just rewatched the confrontation with Fake Angela and if he really found that actress in the acting class it seems like a genuine discovery.

her voice was identical

Nate’s Lizard Lounge

him saying “I’m nate” to a patron at nate’s lizard lounge >>>>

"i love the movie Apocalypto"

― Bruce Stingbean (Karl Malone), Friday, August 12, 2022 11:48 PM (yesterday)

all i could think about was how angela must be an ilxor b/c of ilx's love for that movie 15 years ago

The scene with his parents reminded me of Tom Green.

I was amused by how angry I got at Angela for completely ignoring the premise when Nathan was gone!

gonna say i was not surprised when miriam started talking about israel’s superior microchip technology. more surprised that she didn’t bring up sodastream

i just watched episode 4. this show is hysterical, mind-bending, and heartbreaking and i’ve never seen anything like it before (except of course finding frances)

so far, ep 4 has been my favorite. 3 and 4 in particular, so good

I was amused by how angry I got at Angela for completely ignoring the premise when Nathan was gone!

disappointing but it fits the nathan fielder story. in some ways he reminds me of precocious children who make up games on the spot with elaborate rule systems. They struggle to find people who will play the invented game, if nothing else, because it's too complicated and self-absorbed -- the rule changes always have 100% to do with the little kid and what they think should happen. Kids like that often end up playing alone

sorry if that sounds like an insult to nathan fielder and/or precocious children! there's nothing wrong with playing alone or making up elaborate rule systems, of course. fielder just reminds me of a kid who is in some ways stuck in that world

I don't even know what to think anymore.

Good essay from Sam Adams in Slate (doe Sam post here?):

https://slate.com/culture/2022/08/rehearsal-episode-5-nathan-fielder-hbo-explained-maybe.html

I'm curious if this particular storyline was planned all along or if they just shot so much material that they were able to cobble it together. There has to be like 100 hours of unused footage for this show. In fact I suspect the last episode might actually dive into that idea (iirc pre-screeners didn't get to see the finale which suggests everything is about to turn on its head again)

There has to be like 100 hours of unused footage for this show.

It really depends how much has been scripted, right?

wtf are you talking about, KM? Angela is on a reality show, she pretends the kids and house are hers. The fact Nathan jumps in is meant to be ephemeral, but she already went off script long before he changed the rules, which admittedly fucked the experiment. He “took over” and then left, but she basically decided it was a farce despite the fact she had time for her role. Just complete disinterest in the premise

Nathan rewinding things was completely a break with premise and I get her disconnect there, though

also, rip to Nathan’s irl marriage and the fact his mom thought he was creating another situation for an admittedly fake spouse to march over him.

if he really found that actress in the acting class it seems like a genuine discovery.

IT is getting weirder. Well presumably since it is all scripted and everybody is an actor that must be planned.
But Nathan deciding to take over somebody else's narrative once they have left leaving him the sole parent to how many acting children? Are they still having 3 boys play Adam. Like not weird enough that he would want to raise his fake kid or fake his kid Jewish when it's a fictional situation anyway.
Like is the idea that we think that he who is presumably a versatile fictional role can't tell the difference between real and pretend. So weird.
I bet Angela is gooing to turn up in something else before long, if not in this in a different role.
I was thinking that Nathan's mother was an actress I'd seen in a few things Orange is The New Black and Station Eleven to name 2.

Nathan's mother is not Lori Petty.

I did say was thinking so like past tense.
Hadn't realised Lori Petty was Tank Girl when I saw her in more recent things

Would add another layer if the parents turned out to be actors too though.
LIke is the entire thing about supposed representations of the 'real' anyway.
Or is it just an existential comedy show about like epistemology like.

mental tricks, optical illusions and basic desperation.
& desolation.

Doing magic tricks is reportedly part of Fielder's origin story. Not only does he do a trick to break the ice in at least one episode of Nathan for You, I've read a profile or two where he does a trick to break the ice with a reporter. So sleight of hand and optical illusions are really his thing, the existential/epistemology stuff is like the exploration of illusion in a narrative context.

From that Slate piece I linked to:

The rehearsals themselves apparently parallel ideas from both Kabbalistic study and Jewish midrash, although it’s doubtful that Nathan the character is aware of this. (As for Fielder the writer-director, whom the Forward likens to “a Kabbalistically imagined Jewish God”—who can say?) But they’re rooted in a simple secular precept: Life comes down to a handful of decisive moments, and how you fare in those crucial moments determines whether you will succeed or fail. Nathan tells the actors he’s teaching the Fielder Method that the slightest misstep on their part “could ruin someone’s life,” a line repeated by the actor he hires to play himself. But it finds its most poignant expression in the second episode, “Scion,” when Nathan takes on the role of co-parenting Adam. “It’s scary to imagine raising a child,” he reflects, “when you always know that a single misstep on your part could ruin their entire life.”

And later:

He’s so invested in the idea of narrowing life to a series of predictable, and therefore manageable, possibilities that he hasn’t grasped a basic truth: No matter how much you practice, you will never be ready. What matters most is the ability to accept imperfection, in yourself as well as in others. You will make terrible mistakes, and suffer the consequences: marriages end, people die, things that should have been said never are. But if mistakes were permanent, Angela would still be “standing on the corner drinking 40’s” and not taking part in Nathan’s bizarre experiment. The most important lesson the religious instructor teaches Nathan has nothing to do with Judaism. It’s when he asks if she wants to rehearse her confrontation with Angela and she tells him she prefers to “shoot from the hip.”

So, presuming an at least somewhat scripted/predetermined end is in sight, it becomes an even more complex moral puzzle box: a (somewhat) scripted story of a man playing a version of himself rehearsing scenes based on real scenes (that may also be scripted) about choosing what paths (scripts) we follow and learning (through rehearsal?) that the most honest/"real" path is possibly the one that is unscripted.

I’ve heard him talk in interviews about his love of magic and how it was a good social crutch for him as an awkward young adult, a way of having controlled & manageable social interactions. “Do you want to see a magic trick?”, then you do the trick, you both talk about the trick, the interaction is going to remain within very predictable guidelines.

This show is insane and I love it.

"I hadn't been to a synagogue for years, because it's so boring"

irl loled at that line.

keeping my finger hovering over the "is this antisemitism" ilx thread, ready to click, as Angela explains to Nathan why she wouldn't want her child to learn about judaism

miriam would love that thread

keeping my finger hovering over the "is this antisemitism" ilx thread, ready to click, as Angela explains to Nathan why she wouldn't want her child to learn about judaism

or as she talked about the camerawork of her favorite director

of course miriam really managed to get more racist than angela, in a classic twist ending

not that much of a twist if you've spend much time around people like her

fuck yeah

https://pitchfork.com/news/nathan-fielder-the-rehearsal-gets-second-season-at-hbo/

one of my favorite music shows, "getting asked for an encore"

Ok how can it even go from here? This season seems like a culmination of everything Fielder has done.

crossover episode specials with big brother and the bachelor

Nathan Fielder....will you accept this rose?

Fielder: .....okay.

Uhhhh….holy fuck. Dunno how to process that

Not gonna spoil it but wow that was a great direction to go in

Wow

Great finale, it felt like it should be the series finale. So I'm surprised but delighted to get another season, wonder where it will go next

Awwww man

My grandson Remy is going to be in this somewhere… but which episode(s)? :) He still recognizes you on TV! Lol

— JayTee (@girlTaylor) July 16, 2022

Nathan: What do friends do?
Remy: Nothing

ugh, this episode is a gut punch

Absolutely loved this series and looking forward to watching it again (since almost every bit, apart from some purely humorous moments, seemed to have a purpose in the whole thing, even if it might not have been apparent at first). A few thoughts...
1. The very end (dialog between Liam and Nathan, dressed as Remy and Remy's mother Amber) felt scripted. 2. Regarding the part where Liam corrects Nathan, saying that he thought he was acting as Amber rather than as "Nathan as fake father" at that moment, and Nathan replies that he was being the father - my take-away is that Nathan is saying that being a father (or his idea of a good father) would involve something like going the extra mile to do something as unconventional as dressing up like someone's mother and rehearsing an interaction. 3. My favorite twist was learning that Liam (9-year-old version of Adam) and Nathan's visit to Remy and Amber wasn't solely to check on Remy's well-being (i.e. not pining for Nathan to be his father) but also was so that Liam and Nathan could do acting research on Remy and Amber. It seemed a little selfish at first, but Amber and Nathan's conversation about Amber being sure that Remy would be ok reassured Nathan. And then there's Nathan and Angela's conversation about forgiveness. So ultimately, that final conversation between Liam and Nathan is partially about Nathan forgiving himself for deceiving/confusing Remy, making him think Nathan was his father.

Loved the finale. Nathan finally felt like a father. Also, he roped all the set & costume designers into using the Fielder Method.

“He’s a weird guy isn’t he?”

Classic line. Those little moments of “actually we have some self-awareness about all of this” are the breath of fresh air every episode needs to keep this a comedy and not some try-hard Synecdoche New York TV knock off.

This episode was so child-like because Nathan’s rehearsals are actually an extremely effective empathetic tool. Really that is this shows strength, it’s ability to present with the separation of “art” the emotions that people move through. I found as Nathan was talking to Remy towards the end when Remy was sad I was incredibly sad, when he was laughing I was laughing. I need to think more on how this all is, but I left impressed with how Nathan was able to manipulate me through his rehearsals (manipulation of scenario’s being the proposed key agenda of this project).

Amazing show

Wondering how normative Nathan 's behaviour is to the children he's working with. Like seemed he was being really manipulative in some of his behaviour towards the 6 year old and demonstrating that to the 9 year old. & hoping that wouldn't be behaviour that the 9 year old would think was ok in future.
Just seemed like it was being treated like behaviour was one stage removed from real when it might be picked up as real and repeated as though it was normal/accepted.

Not sure how behaviour would be picked up by 9 year old or on by 9 year old.
The difference between acting and real behaviour and acceptable and unacceptable behaviour seems hazy.
But the weirdness of having children brought into the idea of 'rehearsal' for life decisions seems bizarre anyway. Like they are just implements/tools instead of people.
& Im just wondering about levels of cognition and possible trauma etc.
Very odd and presumably actual participation is less than presented anyway. Though how many takes and rehearsal something like this takes must factor in too.
Like there is a reality to the making of this pseudo reality TV show. Which involves minors in a way that might be questionable.

The idea of consent surely involves having some understanding. & I'm just wondering if some of those involved are mature enough to give consent.
Not to reduce the intelligence of children but I do wonder if they are old enough to understand a situation to be a stage removed from it.
Like Remy acting that he thinks Nathan is daddy. Wondering what one does understand at 6 and what is going to take away from a situation consciously or subconsciously. Seems to be doing things possibly a little too realistically.

I have absolutely no idea what to make of this. All I know is that the words my my wife used to describe it, when prompted, were totally not the words I would have used to describe it, which maybe gets at ... I don't know what it gets at.

Why was the "brief nudity" listed in the ratings details?

Nathan's ass crack at the very end

Why was the "brief nudity" listed in the ratings details?

i didn't notice that, but i do remember that the very final shot was of nathan's buttcrack

it was scandalous. i can no longer go about my everyday life without being disturbed by it

Hey, spoilers!

(That was an xp to the ass crack reveal)

the crack changes everything

the crack says this line which is witty but also clearly scripted

can’t stop wondering what the final shot tells us about season 2

even after rewatching it, i still have no idea what happened. i am the worst watcher of this show

my first thought was that he had adopted Remy, or at least agreed to continue pretending to be his dad.

i know that's not right. i'm just mentioning it to make clear what a gigantic dumbass i am

The subtext, I think, (maybe not so sub), is Nathan working through his divorce, the fallout from his failed relationship and missed chance at having a family of his own. That and his admitted difficulty relating to people and experiencing what they experience. In the end, he does both.

yeah nathan becomes emotionally able / available to be a father through the process of rehearsing, thus shrugging off his damaged past

Him rehearsing as Remy's mom does make me think that could be expanded as a whole season: rehearsing as different people in his own life

Wasn't he divorced almost a decade ago? Seems like a somewhat obscure subtext to explore in this show, the not very well known Fielder working through a 10-year old divorce to someone we've never met and even he rarely talks about. I admittedly have seen a lot of think pieces about this show hinging on Fielder, the real person, but I think The Rehearsal works better as a broader, more general exploration of emotional truth and reality vs. literal truth and reality, vis a vis acting, an almost alchemic process that transforms fiction and lies - that is, pretending - into a heightened "real," where the emotional truth achieved through acting/lying can become as or more powerful than actual reality. (I know very little philosophy, but I'm sure this has been explored in a tome or two.) Regardless, this show is so rich and multi-faceted that I feel it's barely dipped below its many surfaces. And I fear likely won't or can't go much deeper, before it ends or is cancelled, but I'm not sure it matters, since vagueness and ambiguity works to its advantage.

Incidentally, there was a lot of talk about Richard Brody's dismissal of this in the New Yorker, but I am curious what certain naysayers like he thought about the finale, which absolutely did not go where some (any?) expected it to go.

There wasa thing I was trying to allude to yesterday that I'm not sure came across. Presuambly story arcs as p-resented in the tv show would not have been filmed exactly as such , & angela's behaviour at one point would also allude to this.
But what is presented as a story arc is presumably filmed not in order and not in a coherent fashion anyway. But is edited together to seem as though it is. So involvement of children in a story arc is not going to be how they are experiencing things necessarily. But there is going to be a lot of rehearsal and retakes going on which might have the effect of drilling some ideas into heads that might be better without it.
Which is why i was wondering about cognition and how much these children were taking onboard. & if consent revolved around understanding and further to that what a child would understand. LIke obviously there are films/tv being made all the time where a child is in a situation that they are not going to have a full understanding of. Wondering to what extent the presentation has to do with this, like a drama vs a pseudo documentary. THough a child may take things away from either acting situation that may be above their heads or however one wants to put it. & may be stuck with consequent thought/some level of trauma.
I'm just puzzled which presumably means this show is working to some degree.
JUst hoping it isn't leading to those involved needing years of therapy

Actually Angela thing is more that the character does not want to stick to the role she is supposed to be acting out. Worlds within worlds. The making of is another layer on top of taht in which whoever the actress is may be somebody completely different to born again Xian Angela.
Do the family units depicted in this actually exist in the real world like child actor and parents have taht connection in the real world this is filmed in rather than depicts

xp I wouldn’t say the show is “about” the divorce, just that it emerges as a plot in the process of making the show. I actually assume Nathan made this intuitively, following his crazy conceit where it led and working magic in the editing room rather than prescriptively setting out to tell any particular story.

I appreciate that Nathan at least so far doesn’t seem to be giving any interviews explaining anything. Very Lynch/Malick.

I wonder how much of that has to do with the announcement of the S2, especially if a second season was always planned. If he's continuing the same "story" then he's likely enmeshed in it right now, right? Has he done any talk show appearances in support of this show?

Incidentally, there was a lot of talk about Richard Brody's dismissal of this in the New Yorker, but I am curious what certain naysayers like he thought about the finale, which absolutely did not go where some (any?) expected it to go.

The last shot of The Rehearsal, I was secretly prescient, because, after the first five episodes, I said to myself that it's up to viewers to consider whether he's showing his ass or mooning them; I hardly expected that the season would end with that metaphor shown literally.

— Richard Brody (@tnyfrontrow) August 20, 2022

"you're a great scene partner" was such a funny gut punch line

Liam is a better actor than most adult actors on most HBO shows

and

"you're a great scene partner" was such a funny gut punch line

― symsymsym, Wednesday, August 24, 2022 1:08 AM (eighteen hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

fully otm

*the rehearsal season 2*

Nathan Fielder: I wanted to see if Mark Wahlberg was telling the truth so I built a real plane with real terrorists flying at a real building to see if he was on one of the planes on 9/11 if it wouldn’t have gone down like that

— zach reinert (@zachreinert0) August 25, 2022

finally finished this. until the last couple of episodes I guess I regarded it more as an amusing curiosity, maybe finding the artifice and the oppressive silliness a bit too much for me to really get invested. (I think I was the rare person who liked episode 1 more than 2-4?)

but then seemingly out of nowhere these astonishing moments of genuine tenderness and humanity, I was honestly shocked to find myself as moved as I was…I think anyone who’s worked in childcare knows the feeling nathan seemed to have experienced with remy.

Really hope they are done with the kid actors in s2 tbh

I have all confidence that season 2 will be completely different.

Errol Morris gets it. https://t.co/U2SttTV5E0 pic.twitter.com/vJRs3hU560

— Scott Tobias (@scott_tobias) August 27, 2022

I may have said this before but I bet Fielder follows Herzog’s dictum of not seeking literal truth but the “ecstatic truth”.

now this is how you do a meme

(probably NSFW)

https://i.imgur.com/JYuO5po.jpg

Leonardo Dicaprio’s girlfriends when they turn 25 pic.twitter.com/aRxBPDkONw

— Men For Fielder (@MenForFieIder) August 31, 2022

okay, four episodes in i think its pretty clear that this show is "about" mental illness
― i cannot help if you made yourself not funny (forksclovetofu), Saturday, August 6, 2022

I don’t know if I would be where I am today without speech and language therapy. It haunts me, honestly, to think that I probably wouldn’t have the relationships or career path I have now were it not for my early behavioral intervention. But by having this meta-cognitive awareness around my autism, I can appreciate the help I received while recognizing autism as a vital part of my identity and acknowledging my limitations rather than suppressing them.

That moment of Fielder trying to make a good first impression on Kor is something most of us can relate to. But through a lens of disability, it speaks to the loneliness of how masking deprives autistic people of our humanity, of not being afforded the space for awkwardness and messiness in order to make other, more neurotypical, people feel comfortable and secure.

I only just got around to watching the season finale over the holiday weekend. There is something tragicomic in the Fielder character's slow progression from rehearsing the future and anticipating its challenges to rehearsing the past and asking "What could I have done differently?" Somebody upthread mentioned Beckett, and that's very much the vibe I get.

There is something tragicomic in the Fielder character's slow progression from rehearsing the future and anticipating its challenges to rehearsing the past and asking "What could I have done differently?"

This is for real the deepest thing I've read about this show, otm

Agreed and until reading this I didn’t even fully notice/comprehend that that was where we ended up

it's a good point

the more i think about it the more uneasy i am with nathan's use of children. 2 episodes of nathan for you were about kids close to sexual situations. and now the whole season the rehearsal ended up being about kid stuff. like its funny maybe once.

In both those cases (and The Rehearsal, too) he's definitely exploiting kids to manipulate the emotions of adults. It's for sure a pretty cheap trick. Even if the kids were never actually in any sort of danger or whatever, it's really no less sleazy a move than horror movies that put little kids in peril. Effective, but still kind of easy and sleazy. Though I'm not sure how much worse it is than, say, his Holocaust themed clothing store (or, for that matter, peer Sasha Baron Cohen taking advantage of two actual Holocaust survivors for the sake of his dumb comedy). Transgressive comedy that takes advantage of what we intrinsically recognize as tasteless, another (queasy) sleight of hand trick that "The Rehearsal" sort of acknowledges in passing when Angela criticizes Nathan for eating poop. Of course it's not poop, it's just a candy bar, but the effect is largely the same, even if the literal act is essentially victimless.

All assuming any of his projects have any actual reality in it at all?

do think there is cognition involved in anything utterly fake since it is presumably rehearsed if so.

To clarify, I don't know for sure what is and is not to believed as presented, but even more than the reality shows he is parodying I've always got it in the back of my mind that 100% of it is probably scripted, including the narratives about how people in the show are affected by the show, because even those parts are "in the show" and just as much likely to be prewritten.

Like for an actor o be saying something it must be learned to some degree. It's not like it can be channeled from elsewhere or anything and not show that. So there will be some touching on of themes not understood etc so wondering what effect that has.
& if there is enough understanding to actually shut things out before one has a more mature understanding of things and even if one can fully then.
Just did find it very weird the use of child actors for some of the thought here. Not to be overly pro censorship but did have me wondering to what extent things were understood that were touched on

LIke it has to have some understanding for them to deliver, not going to be absolutely abstract. Or they wouldn't be able to coherently.
& is it enough to build to some heavy misunderstandings that they need to work through at a later date.

JUst seems to be something I wouldn't really touch on just to make an amusing tv show. But may be something that has some degree happening every time you have a child actor in a show with adult themes they don't understand. Don't think its completely throwaway.

he keeps doing it. he seems fixated and it's not really that funny.

I thought it was really neat how the final episode turned that whole concept on its head, by using an actor who thought the fake situation was actually real. It did make me wonder a lot about child actors and how often that sort of thing happens. A show like Shameless puts its child actors in much more extreme & graphic situations than this show does & I can't help but wonder if some of them have difficulty differentiating real life and television. afaik this is the only show that really explores that.

also as far as his tendency to use child actors, Nathan's shows thrive on uncomfortable & unpredictable situations, and what's more unpredictable and morally ambiguous than using kids for an adult TV show?

taking real life kids to an evangelical church where they preach about hell all the time

idk i just don't think it's that cool or like taking comedy to the next level. like it's kids man. and the shit he does with them is fucked up.

I would prefer something that did understand consent and I would think consent depended on having an understanding of processes that one was very unlikely to have that young.

i think people are too quick to be like "no this is intelligent tv! there's layers to this! using children is putting a mirror on society!" when it's not actually any of those things. people love nathan and defend him to death. take a step back and look at those eps of nfy and it's actually p fucked up.

Speaking for myself all I was saying was that I don't take anything I saw in the show at face value, including the narrative that a few of the child actors were confused and could not tell real from make-believe. As far as I know those were just plot points in the show as well. Now, whether any of the child actors were confused in the same or other ways OUTSIDE of what we saw, that's another thing. Or maybe both is true and that is sad for those kids and not so funny after all.

This was fascinating television but i dunno if i liked it or can even recommend it exactly? With some distance, it's like a strange dream.

My first reaction after the finale was that the episode was essentially scripted—if not line by line, at least in the “Curb" way. Like, do I believe the real Nathan Fielder, in the course of putting together his show, had some sort of unexpected epiphany about himself or his work on camera? No. I believe he planned the show with a narrative/thematic arc in mind, and as such, he intended from the outset for his character to insert himself into the house, for the show to increasingly focus on “Nathan” and the show’s premise, and that the pointed dialog from fake Angela was scripted. As such, I figured the whole situation with the child actor believing it was real was fictional as well, though that tweet upthread from a family member works against it.

OTOH, my partner took the entire episode at face value as real, unforeseen events—I suppose the answer lies somewhere in between.

I think either the chronology is a little off or he really did leave Angela on her own to go through the motions with ever-aging child actors for a significant amount of time

The irl timeline is one of the many mysteries of the show.

I doubt the months of having a house rented and occupied for months on end was remotely real. But still if they are only filming the small bits that need to be shot to make a narrative it still takes somebody learning parts and rehearsing them and the bits being edited.
Assume that a series of clips supposed to show time lapsing over a given time must be filmed in about that time, though if they're going to go as far as faking weather for the area who really knows. BUt if it is over a longer time then tehy would need to continue to have access to the same place?

When you're out on the town...

Nathan Fielder is at the Mets game and they put him on the Jumbotron 😂 pic.twitter.com/8N66HLRAue

— Lee J 🪩 (@Lee_Jameson) October 8, 2022

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/10/10/kor-skeetes-un-rehearsed-celebrity-life

https://www.gq.com/story/gq-hype-nathan-fielder-men-of-the-year-2022

men for fielder of the year

Fashion can be so ridiculous. In the second photo in that article, you can maybe just about tell that Nathan is wearing a black belt - a few centimetres of it are showing.

Belt (price upon request), by Ann Demeulemeester.

"Oh man, I love that belt he's wearing! I must request the price to see if I can afford to make that kind of impression!"

https://www.interviewmagazine.com/culture/kate-berlant-in-conversation-with-nathan-fielder

i have liked some of Kate Berlant's work but Cinnamon in the Wind left me cold.

ok

it's improv so i imagine it varied from performance to performance. being in the audience for that kind of show is more or less necessary, you have to be part of the energy of the room and watch her react to what the crowd is giving out or else it comes off (as I found it on tape) premeditated, hyperaware and joyless... and not in the way she intended.

i thought it was really good, i find her enjoyable to watch even if i'm not cracking up

Enjoyed the show for the most part until the last episode. I thought there was going to be some “stop”, so to speak, with the rehearsal when he realized what had happened with Remy. The fact he kept going and portraying Remy’s mother and “acting” as her left a real sour taste for me.

Okay, here is the official trailer for the new season of The Rehearsal pic.twitter.com/e4NxM5CmSK

— nathan fielder (@nathanfielder) April 3, 2025

uuuuuuuuum ... sure

timely

"You're known for prankin' people!"

Unexpectedly, I'm completely psyched for this

I just rewatchdd S1E1, I had forgotten how absolutely brilliant the editing and v/o narration are re: comic timing

Have now rewatched thru episode 4. Even though I knew it was coming, I still died laughing when his son went down the slide

It was good that they finally talked about stuff. But after the training, the vibe in the room was weird. I wasn't sure what it meant.

The reveal in the first scene where Nathan appears standing in the inferno on the outside of the cockpit at eye level with the "dead" pilots was just incredible, like something out of Fire Walk With Me.

I liked-but-didnt-love S1 of the Rehearsal and didnt finish The Curse for similar reasons - with each project he seems less interested in being funny. Its interesting (and funny) to see that issue being set up as an actual plotline in this season.

To me, it is extremely funny when we hear Nathan's authoritative documentary narrator explain, in complete earnestness, that he has solved the problem of not being able to film his pilot-informant inside a restricted area of an airport by building a massive and detailed replica of all the unrestricted parts of the airport that they were able to film in, populating it with actors, and asking the pilot to walk through the replica airport to reach a room where, it turns out, the only thing anyone does is sit in silence.

I understand that not everyone shares my sense of humor.

Is he actually doing investigative journalism here?

There was some Penn & Teller line about all magic is is someone going through such lengths to stage something that you would never believe they would do that, and it feels like that's the throughline for this series.

And of course Fielder has always been an accomplished magician.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0WsWJTnVg-M

Hospitality is what separates us from the animals

i had really done it….i had brought canadian idol back to life

xxp damn… I didn’t realize he was also the new Ricky Jay

oh god, watching now and… and airline captain who just admits “I’ve been banned from nearly every dating app”

Nathan gets people to say the wildest shit

holy shit at the animation of Paramount+ Germany’s influence spreading

I don't know what to make of this yet, but it's doing my brain in.

xp Yeah the animation made me wheeze like I got hit in the chest with something

Was reading what others have been saying, and obvious though it may be, it didn't even occur to me that when he met with that rejected contestant in the parking lot they had switched roles, with Nathan now auditioning, pleading to the "judge" that rejected *him*.

BTW, the Summit Ice site has been revamped, and contains this gem:

https://summiticeapparel.com/collections/apparel/products/summit-series-no-logo-pullover-hoodie

Summit Series No-Logo Pullover Hoodie
$70.00
Wear your pride on the inside.

This cotton fleece hoodie was designed without a visible logo, allowing you to take a stand for Holocaust awareness without triggering those who don't share your beliefs.

Some sleuths on the internet noticed something interesting before this season even aired, but it could be a major spoiler for what's coming up:
There is a FAA registration for a Nathan Joseph Fielder as of last year. It includes certification to fly a 737.

as for the current episode, I was nodding and mumbling "yes, of course" when he had his bar recreation shipped to California and added to the airport layout

oh god, watching now and… and airline captain who just admits “I’ve been banned from nearly every dating app”

Nathan gets people to say the wildest shit

― ɥɯ ︵ (°□°) (mh), Wednesday, 30 April 2025 00:25 (fourteen hours ago)

I wouldn't take anything at face value here... not because I have any insider info but because it's a Nathan Fielder show

I mean, even if it's scripted and not a spontaneous thing.. oof

he outdid himself with this one

watching over my work lunch hour as I do. this specific Nathan costume/set is very disturbing!

Possibly the hardest I’ve ever laughed at anything.

I think my hardest laughing was during a scene I will call “the Sully 23 second hypothesis”

he had wings of voice contestant sing public domain songs because they were saving the music budget for this week

*contestants

Oh man, the stilts took me out.

The clone dogs were incredible too. Blowing compressed San Jose air. "I'm going out with the guys to see the Hangover part 2." The whole concept of a stay-at-home pet mom!

I wonder if it was cow milk or

the Jared Fogle Subway ad on the bus stop lol

the milk

“I recently worked on a show for Paramount+, a network with questionable viewpoints”
between that and his comments on not feeling anything romantic while showing the romance bits from that show, I’m dying

had to pause that one a couple of times out of embarrassment

this was the most autistic person trying to understand human interactions yet, & that is saying something

I'm a couple of episodes behind, but:

https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/the-rehearsal-nathan-fielder-fake-singing-show-contestant-1236393533/

Love signed the contract and was joined by more than 1,000 other auditioners, she estimates. The production looked just like “The Voice,” or any other singing competition show. “The only abnormal thing is that we auditioned for an airline pilot,” she says.

She made it through her first audition, so production held her in a waiting room for three to four hours and told her she would next have to perform “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” or “Yankee Doodle.” (In the show, Fielder explains that he has the contestants sing public domain songs so he can avoid paying licensing fees.)

I just saw the Sully episode, and hoo boy, what a ride that was.

couldnt have less sympathy for anyone who spends five figures to audition for a reality competition show

I thought the pack idea was kind of dumb but I genuinely think he’s on to something giving people the opportunity to practice uncomfortable situations through role playing

as an introvert who has a hard time chatting with new people, this whole arc with the pilots just standing around not talking really kills me. i couldn't imagine if my job placed me in that situation every day

dumb and silly idea but i wonder if there could be some way to hack your brain into releasing oxytocin by like requiring pilots do some elaborate secret handshake as part of a greeting procedure

I can’t stop thinking about the pilot whose idea of small talk was garden variety sexual harassment

Also do you know how hard it is to be.banned from dating apps? It takes a LOT of work and this guy was banned from virtually all of them?! Yikes

This season has been incredible so far. Some of the Nathan for You episodes feel like they hit on an idea that is close to genius, though obv would need refinement. This season feels like he's hit on a real problem and his insane methods are gradually refining to a real solution

xxp the dating advice pilot has a YouTube channel, and… Nathen did not script him to be that way, that was all him

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Wulkan

I am not at all surprised! The Hugh Hefner of hair is beaming out of his every pore.

I don't even know what to think about last night's episode. In some ways the least funny ep of the whole series. But it was good regardless. I think I need to watch it again.

Pleasant disorientation/"I have no idea where he's going next" isn't exactly the same thing as comedy, but even when this show isn't doing the latter it manages to induce the former, which makes it compelling viewing for me

ok wow

This season is really something incredible, even for him. Don't really care if it's a comedy anymore or not, I'll watch anything he wants to make

other than the third episode, I really struggled to care about this season (I seem to be alone in this)

I admire Nathan's ambition and his willingness to throw away HBO's money though

What happened to the premise of the whole season in the end? Shouldn’t there have been some sort of collection and analysis of the in-flight footage for him to use to re-pitch to lawmakers again (somehow)? It seemed to be in focus up until they landed. Instead it was dropped and the only thing that concluded was the new side revelation of him discovering and burying a possible autism diagnosis.

I was slightly surprised they didn't return to that at the end, but maybe they tried to re-pitch and got nowhere with it. Or maybe we'll see it next season

Well, I guess his ultimate conclusion is also that pilots are incentivized not to look into their own mental health. So maybe he doesn't want to keep exploring a solution

was listening to NPR in the car this morning and heard an episode of 1A called "Ask a Pilot." the snippet below was so relevant to The Rehearsal that I thought it was actually prompted by the show, but apparently the 1A episode was a rerun.

WHITE
Aidan, thanks for that call. I also want to read a message from Oklahoma. "What's the stigma around becoming a commercial pilot while prescribed SSRIs? I know it's not impossible, and there are organizations that work with medical professionals to help obtain medical clearance, but how do employers and peers handle it? Is it taboo?"

And SSRIs are medications used to treat depression, anxiety, and other mental health conditions. Jason, what can you tell us?

MIDDLETON
Yeah, I'm so glad this question was asked. I have such a strong opinion on this, and I believe this is a massive failure of the AME, the Office of the Aviation Medical Examiners. I mean, if you think about the population, there's about 320,000 commercial pilots in the world, worldwide.

And just in the U.S., it's estimated that 25% of the population has some sort of mental health issues, meaning on the spectrum from low depression up to very severe issues. And the problem in aviation is if you check that box, you're done.

So, what it's doing, it's either making aviators lie to the FAA about what they're doing and hiding the medication that they're taking, that they should be taking, or they're flying untreated, which is a huge problem as well. And the way that the FAA is structured, the aviation medical system is really, really set up for failure, in my opinion.

And this is not just my opinion. I'm sure Tomica would agree and James as well on this point.

WHITE
Yeah, I see Tomica and James both nodding. Jim, anything to add there?

FALLOWS
This is one more. Yes, I agree with everything that Jason said. And I think one of the points about current changes is if you don't have any perfectly clean medical clearance, you have to have some approval from the medical headquarters in Oklahoma City of the FAA.

And there's an enormous, maybe year-long backup in there simply being able to review these applications and waivers, and their staff is being cut too. So, this is one just very tangible illustration of how staff cutbacks can affect flying safety.

there is committing to a bit, and then there is becoming a licensed commercial airline pilot over a period of years

i was pretty awed by the final monologue (taking off in ecuador, flying solo across the atlantic until he reaches the "welcoming sands of namibia." maybe he really does love the solitude of being a pilot after all?)

my surface level take is that he fell victim to the problem he was trying to solve. theres pointing out the obvious problem with the self-reporting medical certifications, but also the ego, human nature, validation, whatever you want to call it that prevents him from giving it all up after the sunk cost of those years spent getting to that point. at the end, the copilot seemed totally open and comfortable and embodying all the lessons that nathan was trying to teach, but nathan himself was the one embodying all the dangerous behaviors that he was trying to stamp out in other people, leaving important things unsaid so as not to make things "weird" in the cockpit. at the end of the day theres just an overpowering human urge to go with the flow and just hope that nothing bad will happen. it reminded me of nathan for you, where so much of the comedy came from people being nicer to nathan than they should, seeing the lengths people will go to in order to accommodate a madman and go along with his bad ideas just to avoid an uncomfortable conversation.

you could also read the whole thing as a rehearsal for his own benefit, the altruism of improving cockpit communication actually just him knowing that he had issues understanding emotions and communication, and that all the rehearsing would make him finally overcome his own doubts about his mental health and be able to tell himself he's normal, taking his own problem and projecting it onto everyone else

Omg the Summit Ice website text is amazing.

https://summiticeapparel.com/pages/about

“In October of 2023, our sales plummeted by nearly 90% and we couldn’t figure out why. After extensive market research, only one answer made sense: consumers had suddenly become more savvy about the quality of softshell jackets. Therefore, we believe the best way to achieve our goal of raising awareness is by shifting our primary brand focus from genocide to craftsmanship.”

I enjoyed this interview with Fielder:
https://www.vulture.com/article/nathan-fielder-the-rehearsal-season-two-finale-interview.html

Non-paywalled: https://archive.ph/El8ZF

just watching the finale now

nathan knows he’s blowing it up, his expert says that it won’t be a real example for legal purposes, and as his remit goes, he’s doing the real rehearsal

and then his dialogue about being formerly into gambling followed by his room having a big dive/cards Las Vegas logo over it… yes

I'm not sure I've ever seen anything like this before, and in fact, I'm still not quite sure exactly what it is that I watched.

finally got around to the first episode of s2 and the shot of nathan standing outside the plane window as they simulate it taking off is just wonderful

i totally blubbed at the finale. couldn't tell you why yet

nathan went on cnn to talk airline safety

https://bsky.app/profile/bkoo.bsky.social/post/3lqcxvlugn225

https://bsky.app/profile/junlper.beer/post/3lqd6kpplzk2g

I saw some intriguing (to me at least) discussion about not whether Nathan was actually flying the plane but whether there were actually passengers on the plane he was flying, actors or no. On one hand, if he did the work, as it appears he did, he was within his rights to do what he did. But would or could HBO actually insure the production if even theoretically all those people were at risk, should anything have gone wrong? Don't know how that works, but for sure Nathan has not been above slight of hand and tricky editing. This final episode even underscored his magician bona fides.

Doesn't change anything, of course. Still fascinating stuff. Big interview here:

https://archive.ph/Ft43G

The actor passengers probably signed a mound of paperwork releasing hbo from liability

I'm not sure those liability waivers work that way, but I'm not a lawyer.

Someone on Reddit mentioned that they knew one of the passengers on the flight, and it was real. (If you trust a random redditor, that is.) However, there's also been speculation that there were two flights and that the the exterior shots (from the aerial photography unit) were of a flight without passengers.

Interview with Rep. Steve Cohen, who is still befuddled by Fielder:

“We had a nice discussion about different things and got along and posed for pictures afterwards,” Cohen said of the meeting. “He did have a tendency to just to just kind of sit and say nothing at times. How much of that was schtick and how much of it was real I never really knew — and I still don't know.”

...

“Maybe people thought I acted abruptly at the end," Cohen said. "But we’d had a long meeting, and I got up and said, ‘It's been nice talking with you’ because I had another appointment I was late for. But he's an awkward guy. Or he acted like he was awkward.”

But how would a passenger even know it was real? The door to the cockpit is closed while it is in flight, we can't see the pilots actually piloting.

it kind of plays into his theme a little bit, because it's a black box, so to speak. no one really knows what goes on in there.

I also found the finale really touching

Didn’t expect to like this season nearly as much as I did. I don’t think I even finished s1!

“I’m here, so I must be ok” was such a perfect line.

I’m watching him on CNN giving a remarkably sincere interview about aviation safety, but also dying at him repeatedly going out of his way to refer to his 737 flight as ‘the miracle on the mojave.’

yes that did happen

I Totally butchered the final line

whoops missed that voodoo chili, has posted abt the cnn interview hours earlier. there were some good laffs in the full 15min segment, including him referring to himself as a hero who saved hundreds of innocent lives (bc he landed the plane safely)

Just finished my god. The one actor who questioned how many of the other actors declined to get on the flight and then responded with “actors” was amazing

need a comp of the accompanying promos for this season as a b-sides collection to the season

what would the difference be between a licensed commercial pilot certified to fly a 737 flying a bunch of actors in the plane and Nathan, a licensed commercial pilot certified to fly a 737 be?

Nathan's also apparently been flying empty 737s around as a side gig and that's pretty verifiable

I liked how his reaction to his copilots squinting face mirrored the autism test he struggled with

I think one of Nathan's greatest strengths isn't doing things that seem unreal, but instead doing things that are completely out of left field far in advance and only pulling back the curtain at the last minute

he admits it on the show, but he obviously had conversations where he explained to the pilots that he, himself, was a licensed pilot to be honest and build rapport throughout the entire season and he cut every single one of them! we get to the last episode and we're finally in on the bit. just an amazing payoff

I doubt he'd go that deep again, but it's funny to imagine a season where he's doing something similar but about Nascar drivers, and we get to the last episode and he walks over to a car that has the SUMMIT ICE logo splashed across the hood and he jumps in

lol yeah a real missed opportunity to not have summit ice livery on the plane, that would have been incredible

I just read a New Yorker piece on the finale and was thinking that he really is the closest to Andy Kaufman as far as effectively blurring the line on if they really are that way or not

what would the difference be between a licensed commercial pilot certified to fly a 737 flying a bunch of actors in the plane and Nathan, a licensed commercial pilot certified to fly a 737 be?

Well, if what the show said is accurate, about 1500 hours in the air, plus other certification standards that he didn't get, vs. a loophole? This is something I just saw on Indiewire:

For “The Rehearsal,” we see some of that prep work in the show’s most stunning flashback to date — the two years that Fielder spent training to become a licensed commercial pilot type-rated to fly a 737, and the show’s search for a rentable 737 safe enough to fly. Fielder was still probably well short of the flight hours needed to achieve his airline transport pilot’s license at the time of shooting “The Rehearsal” finale, which is the certification that the vast majority of pilots flying passenger planes have.

But even so, Fielder dedicated himself to learning enough material to fill a college degree in a condensed amount of time, in addition to his work as a comedian. Although it comes out a little bit heartbreaking as the final voiceover of the series, from an insurance perspective if Fielder’s allowed to be in the cockpit, then he must be fine.

The main answer, therefore, in how “The Rehearsal” got away with packing a real airplane full of real people (even if they are actors) and flying it in the actual sky is that Fielder did the work to be qualified to fly it, that the production found a plane airworthy enough (thankfully, without bird nests), and that the team around Fielder, from his co-pilot to the show’s aviation consultants (two are credited in the episode, Steve Giordano and Robert Allen) to the crew in the chase plane, were experienced enough for HBO’s army of lawyers to agree they had indeed mitigated as much risk as possible.

the other trick is that there was a licensed passenger airline pilot in the cockpit, it just wasn’t Nathan

I remember from discussions on PPRUNE that the typical cost to become a pilot for Ryanair was something in the region of £103,000 - for some reason the £3,000 at the end stood out - and you have to cough up that money yourself. Actually, no, a bit of Googling reveals that it's €103,500:
https://afta.ie/mentorship-ryanair/eu-ryanair-future-flyer-programme-ab-initio/

If my calculations are correct you spend 98 hours flying and a lot of time in the simulator and attending "long briefs", unless I'm misreading it and that's part of the uniform. Ryanair pays its captains £70k/€80k, so assuming you're willing to slum it, you'd start to make a profit after working 4-5 years. By that time you would be sick of seeing Spain from forty thousand feet. I assume a lot of that course involves night-time navigation and route planning stuff that Fielder probably wouldn't have had to bother with.

Imagine for the next series of The Rehearsal that Fielder tries to sort out Tom Cruise's life. By dressing up as Tom Cruise, following Tom Cruise around, attending premieres with Tom Cruise. Imagine that the final episode is released to cinemas as a reboot of the Mission: Impossible franchise starring Nathan Fielder, and imagine that it's a huge success. That would be a heck of a thing.

I wonder how difficult it would be to erase an actor's film history and replace it with AI. Imagine a background actor in the recent streaming version of Willow who only appeared in that show - I pick Willow because it never had a physical release and it's currently unavailable. Imagine if Fielder took over that man's life and, with AI, replaced him, George Lucas-style. Imagine doing that with multiple releases spread across different studios, over a long period of time. That would be an impressive stunt. At this point the elaborate nature of the stunt has taken over from the emotional core of the programme.

Or imagine if he surreptitiously replaced every physical copy of a particularly rare printing of the Bible with an exact duplicate that has "thou shalt commit adultery" instead of the original wording.

Funny you should mention Tom Cruise. I just saw the new M:I this afternoon and the Rehearsal finale tonight, and there’s definitely some similarity between Tom Cruise hanging off a biplane in midair to entertain an audience and presumably to prove to himself that he’s still got it and Nathan flying a 737 and concluding “I must be ok.” I guess what I’m saying is Nathan is the Tom Cruise of comedy.

That CNN interview is great. Love when he starts interrogating Wolf Blitzer. “You were in Mission: Impossible.”

one thing the Sully episode reminded me of was the NFY where he elaborately concocts a wild scenario all so that he has a story to tell on Jimmy Kimmel. in retrospect that feels like a dry run for this show. as does the episode where he creates "The Hunk".

interesting how with NFY there was always this open question of how much of it was real, how much the subjects actually knew, and whether any of them were actually actors...whereas The Rehearsal sees that line and stomps all over it. gotta say I was pretty thrilled by the turn Ep 5 makes (the autism one), after it spent time wondering how many pilots may have undiagnosed mental issues I wondered if he'd look inward like that

also wanna say Nathan muttering "oh fuck" as he's getting blasted with milk from the giant puppet Mommy is probably the hardest I've ever laughed at anything on TV save for maybe certain On Cinema moments

that moment felt like the "real" Nathan slipping out (if there ever is such a thing on his shows)

it definitely felt like it happened when that lady was talking about getting turned on by Einstein

anyways one moment that really stuck out to me was Nathan testing out the whacking off on a bus joke in the mock Congressional hearing. nobody laughs the first time, then he takes them aside to ask if they thought the joke was funny, and when they said they did, he tells them to just act as normal, if something's funny they can laugh. so in the next take everyone is doubled over in laughter in a clearly exaggerated fashion.

what I loved about that scene (outside of it being hilarious) was how it suggested that an actor who is just playing "a normal person" with no other direction still puts that layer of distance between themselves and the character, they're focused on the 'performance' and therefore ignore their normal impulses (such as laughing at a joke), which is a microcosm of what the show is about. but at the same time it's sort of a macrocosm (is that a word?) of the show's theme, since the bit is obviously scripted (at least the last part was). I feel like a lot of the things he tried to do didn't actually go as he hoped - I think he really was ultimately trying to get a law changed, he really did want Colin and the actress to fall in love, he was trying to get something interesting to happen with the dog clone but nothing really did. this happened in NFY all the time. but in the actual show itself, Nathan can control everything that happens. he can use the footage to tell whatever story he wants to. he's the captain.

also I felt the smile he cracked when everyone was uncontrollably laughing was actually kind of genuine. I mean it was still him telling the joke. that's another theme he explores a lot, whether an acting performance can make you feel a real emotion. kinda dovetails with the stuff he does in Ep 3 with the fake Colins.

Iirc one of the few clear examples of him breaking character is in the Nathan for You episode when the guy admits to drinking his own piss.

*his grandchild’s piss

lol that's right!

Someone dug this up:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EuTd6xUyLos

I liked S1 pretty much, but S2 was better in pretty much every way. It felt like it hit harder and was also funnier.

That scene where Nathan is contemplating getting the fMRI results to find out if he has autism, etc. felt so real with the flashbacks to him copying people growing up like it was something he had wrestled with his entire life.

i felt pretty up and down watching s2 but ultimately it had so many amazing moments. The baby Sully stuff had me rofling. The pack bit was a bit annoying and brought to mind an Armando Ianucci sketch. but the last ep was great for all the reasons discussed upthread.

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