![]() Remy understands just enough of what is happening on The Rehearsal to call Nathan his pretend daddy, but insists, “My pretend daddy loves me!” Remy’s mother Amber explains that Remy does not have a father and has grown sensitive on the subject of dads. One of them, Remy, sobs at the notion of leaving, or even of changing out of his wardrobe. The finale opens with “Adam” celebrating his ninth birthday - in one more example of the series’ appealing lunacy, Nathan fills the party with background extras to save $15,000, not realizing that union rules forbid any of them from speaking while cameras rolled - while Nathan says goodbye to all the actors who played the six-year-old Adam. Which brings us to “Pretend Daddy.” The previous episode ended with Angela quitting the project, in part because she realized Nathan had transformed this parenting rehearsal so it would primarily be about him, in part because she began to fear - not without reason - that the show was presenting her in a way that would lead to mockery. And no matter which side of the yea/nay divide people found themselves, it was hard to find agreement about what percentage of it, if any, should be taken at face value. For others, the idea that any of it might be real - that Fielder might be playing with people’s lives on a deeper and more intimate level than the terrible business ideas he proposed on Nathan For You - was disturbing. ![]() And even “The Fielder Method” blurred the lines of the show’s reality by having Nathan arrange for one of his actors to more deeply impersonate a real person, followed by Nathan impersonating the actor learning to impersonate the real person, another actor impersonating Nathan giving the actor instructions on how to impersonate the real person, and on and on.įor many viewers (I was one of those), the sheer, absurd scale of the fictionalized world Nathan created was hilarious regardless of which parts were true and which were wholly scripted. But the very design of the show made it easy for viewers to latch onto the idea that Angela was herself an actor. And in the season’s creative high point, “The Fielder Method,” we not only saw how Nathan recruited and trained new actors to appear in the rehearsals, but got to know a few of them well enough that we would recognize them when they reappeared later in the season, to more clearly delineate artifice from genuineness. Fielder and the rest of the creative team (he directed the finale, and wrote it with Carrie Kemper and Eric Notarnicola) appeared to be pulling back the curtain at every turn, but were they? We saw the method used to constantly swap out all the actors playing Angela’s would-be son Adam, as a way to comply with child labor laws. With The Rehearsal, it seems impossible to tell where fact ends and fiction begins. Nathan Fielder to Get a Second Shot at Human Connection With Season Two of 'The Rehearsal' Which is why some Rehearsal viewers consider the first season finale, “Pretend Daddy,” as another example of Fielder’s singular filmmaking genius, while others - this one included - turned off the episode with a bad taste in their mouths. Any aspect of the show that does not conform to the opinion you’ve already built about it can be reinterpreted to support, rather than undermine, your argument. You bring your own conspiracy theories to it. As a result, The Rehearsal becomes a comedic Rorschach Test. We just know so little about which parts are real, which parts are not, what happened that we did not see, and how much more empathetic Fielder may be than the version of himself he plays here (and before that, on Nathan For You). This post contains spoilers for the season finale of The Rehearsal, which is now streaming on HBO Max.Īmong the most clever things about Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal is that its very structure, along with the secrecy behind how Fielder and company produced the docu-comedy, makes it almost entirely analysis-proof.
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