The Rehearsal may well be the most uncomfortable 40 minutes of television you’ll see in many years. It may also be the best.
The show asks a simple question: what if you were to rehearse the big moments in your life over and over again, taking into account every possibility, so that you were prepared for every eventuality and could achieve the best outcome. Sounds great, right? Who wouldn’t want to nail that first approach to a long-time crush?
Ask for that promotion in just the right way? Come clean about something in a manner that doesn’t lose you friendships, respect or both? Nathan Fielder is promising to offer just that.
But who is this guy? Nathan Fielder, virtually unknown in the UK, is a Canadian comedian who has spent years in the States perfecting his unique slab of awkward comedy in Nathan For You, where he would help real businesses with real problems in the stupidest way imaginable completely unbeknownst to them.
The Rehearsal is much the same except this time he’s helping real people who have been putting something off that has been bothering them.
The first episode introduces us to Kor Skeete, a trivia-obsessed man from New York who has been lying to his pub quiz team about his education, telling them he has a master’s degree when he actually has a bachelor’s.
An innocuous lie but one that has grown over the years and which he finally wants to come clean about. Nathan meets him and promises him a safe space where he can rehearse his confession to make sure it’s just right
Except it technically isn’t the first time he’s met him. It’s revealed that Nathan had some of his team infiltrate Kor’s flat so he could create a perfect replica of it in which he could rehearse that very interaction. Every joke. Every conversation. All of it was played out beforehand with an actor playing Kor to guarantee the best results.
And it only gets more uncomfortable from there. Nathan takes him on a bonding exercise where he pre-planned exactly how to manipulate the conversation. He creates a perfect replica of the bar which Kor is going to confess to one of his friends who he expects to take the news particularly badly.
That friend has, naturally, already been spoken to unknown to her by the actress playing her so that she can best mimic her mannerisms. On and on it goes adding more and more lies and deception to the act.
It’s easy to forget that this is a comedy but it is – and a very funny one at that. Nathan appearing with his flowcharts of every possible way a conversation could go is so preposterous you can’t help but laugh. His social awkwardness makes every interaction painful in a cringe comedy way that will work for some but will have others climbing the walls. And he’s not opposed to donning some ludicrous disguises to get the job done.
There is, of course, a question that lingers over any kind of docu-reality series: are these people in on the act? The fact that I genuinely don’t know is what makes The Rehearsal such uncomfortable television because if Kor isn’t then there’s something very cruel at the heart of this show – and Nathan realises it.
At the end of the episode Nathan comes clean to Kor about how much he has lied to him and tricked him – but when the camera turns back to Kor it isn’t him at all but the Fake Kor who proceeds to scold Nathan and call him a terrible person before it switches back to the real Kor without any explanation of what he actually said.
It genuinely caused a pit of anxiety to form in my stomach in a way even the best horror films couldn’t.
Earlier Kor had described Nathan as a Willy Wonka figure promising him a world of pure imagination. Nathan seemed taken aback by the comparison considering Wonka to be ‘the bad guy’ in the story. The Rehearsal offers no clear indication of whether he is right or wrong.
The Rehearsal is available to stream on NOW.
