What if you could rehearse life’s hardest moments (awkward confessions, brutal breakups, etc.) over and over again until you nailed them? In a real-world environment?
The Rehearsal is the best documentary I’ve seen on the absurd lengths we go to control outcomes in an uncontrollable world.
Kevin Lanik recommended this one. I’ve never seen anything like it.
It’s one of the most uncomfortable things I’ve watched — but I couldn’t stop watching.
Trailer for “The Rehearsal”
You Can’t Make This Sh!t Up
- Nathan Fielder shaves off all his body hair, puts on a diaper, and reenacts airline pilot Sully Sullenberger’s infancy inside a warehouse-turned-giant nursery, complete with a towering puppet mom on stilts.
- Fielder gets a real pilot’s license after being mocked as “the slowest learner” by his instructor—just so he can stage a fake emergency mid-flight with 150 actors simulating a drama in the air.
Watch “The Rehearsal”
You can watch “The Rehearsal” on HBO Max and Amazon.
Ratings:
- My Rating: 91/100
- IMDB Rating: 8.5/10
- Rotten Tomatoes Ratings: 89/100 (Users), 96/100 (Critics)
Director’s Note: Nathan Fielder is the creator, director, and star of the series. If you’ve seen “Nathan for You,” you know what to expect. But this is more layered, more expensive, and way more ethically complicated. He takes performance anxiety and turns it into its own genre. He also greenlit the HBO series “How To with John Wilson“.
Release Date: July 15, 2022 (Season 1)
My Review of “The Rehearsal”
The Setup
Each episode starts with someone who wants help rehearsing a difficult life moment. Confessing a lie, raising a child, asking for an inheritance. Nathan Fielder builds absurdly elaborate simulations to help them prepare, complete with doppelgänger actors and full-scale set replicas.
But this isn’t just about helping people. It’s about Fielder himself—his obsession with control, his awkwardness with real emotion, and how far he’s willing to go to engineer the perfect outcome. The show starts as an experiment in empathy and ends as a mirror into Fielder’s own psyche. It’s rehearsals within rehearsals, and no one—not even Nathan—is in control by the end.
More Highlights from the Doc
- In episode 1, Nathan builds a full replica of a Brooklyn bar so a guy can practice confessing to his trivia team that he lied about having a master’s degree—for years. It’s like a military simulation, but for minor guilt.
- In episode 2, a woman named Angela rehearses motherhood with real babies swapped out every few hours due to child labor laws. When her “fake husband” drops out, Nathan steps in as pretend dad—and things get dark.
- The “Fielder Method” involves actors spying on real people to learn their behaviors—then training actors to play both themselves and the people they’re studying, while Fielder plays the actor playing the student. Yes, it’s that meta.
- Angela is deeply religious and anti-Halloween, so Nathan fakes a crisis where her fake son sneaks out to trick-or-treat. Meanwhile, in a parallel rehearsal, two brothers argue over inheritance money.
- By episode 4, the fake son (named Adam) ages up to a rebellious teen overnight. Nathan’s desire to control outcomes leads him to secretly raise the child Jewish—without telling Angela.
- In the finale, Fielder fully blurs reality. He reenacts the entire season from a different angle, questioning whether he’s helped or harmed the people involved—and whether his own need for control is the real subject.
Lesser-Known Details from the Doc
- The production used hidden cameras and gathered personal data without the subjects always knowing upfront. It’s part of what makes this show so unsettling to watch.
- Fielder hired child actors who didn’t always know they were acting in a show, especially in the “pretend family” storylines—raising real ethical concerns that are addressed, but never resolved.
- The sets were built down to incredible detail—including fake plumbing, working light switches, and exact floor plans of real homes—just for a 5-minute rehearsal of a single conversation.
- When the show debuted, some fans thought it was entirely scripted. But no—HBO confirmed it’s all based on real people and real rehearsals, even if Nathan manipulates the hell out of the situations.
Wrap Up
If you’re into psychological experiments disguised as comedy, “The Rehearsal” will blow your mind. Just be warned: it’s as much about manipulation as it is about preparation.
Thanks for reading!
Heather Fenty, Guest Writer, Daily Doc