This article contains spoilers for the first episode of HBO's The Rehearsal (2022)
It's been five years since Nathan Fielder's Nathan For You ended its run on Comedy Central. The hilarious show provided dozens of businesses with dubious advice for four seasons and then ended on a high note with the brilliant finale, "Finding Frances." Fielder has kept busy since then, working on two different shows for HBO; Sacha Baron Cohen's Who Is America? and the underrated How to with John Wilson. However, it took half a decade for him to get back in front of the camera, again for HBO.
The first episode of Fielder's new show, The Rehearsal, just premiered its first episode, “Orange Juice, No Pulp,” this past Friday. The Rehearsal features Fielder using HBO's substantial resources to give people the opportunity to practice potentially awkward social situations beforehand with the most intricate methods available. Based on the first episode, it's clear that the comedian's new show is just as entertaining and compelling as his previous program and has the potential to be even better. With that in mind, here's how The Rehearsal distills the best parts of Nathan For You into a more thought-provoking product.
Cringe Comedy
The most immediate appeal of both Nathan for You and The Rehearsal is their cringe comedy. Nathan Fielder is incredibly awkward and great at making uncomfortable, yet humorous, situations out of any interaction. So far, The Rehearsal has less of Fielder playing up his natural social incompetence and uses its extended runtime to more slowly build discomfort throughout the episode more organically.
The Rehearsal is less straightforwardly funny than Nathan For You, but it still has great comedic moments. For example, the scene where Fielder introduces himself to the first episode's subject, Kor, is hilariously stiff. The look of dejection after discovering that the TV trivia-loving Kor has never watched a single segment of Nathan For You is just comedy gold. Learning that this awkward interaction was rehearsed by Fielder numerous times is just icing on the cake.
Odd Strangers
Nathan For You had a wonderful tendency to attract some of the weirdest people in the greater Los Angeles area. Whether it was the gas station attendant who drank his grandson's urine or the security guard obsessed with breasts, the people Nathan Fielder encountered were often the highlight of an episode. This is also already true with The Rehearsal. As with his previous show, Fielder makes ingenious use of Craigslist, posting a vague ad that reads, “TV opportunity: Is there something you’re avoiding? Submit video.”
This ambiguous request leads Fielder to Kor, a maladjusted schoolteacher who only seems to care about trivia. He's not the strangest person Fielder has come across, but he's quirky enough to make for a compelling first subject. His one-track mind makes Fielder's task, helping him reveal to a friend that he lied about having a master's degree, much more difficult. The best moment of the entire episode emerges out of this, with Kor calling Fielder a bad person for indirectly helping him cheat at trivia, despite Kor's success with coming clean about his lie to his friend. It's an absolutely devastating scene that rivals the best material from his Comedy Central program.
Elaborate Schemes
In a single episode, The Rehearsal has already one-upped Nathan For You's absurd business proposals with multiple over-the-top ideas being executed. The recreation of the bar where the rehearsals take place, based on a Williamsburg dive called the Alligator Lounge, is immaculate, with matching rips in the chair foam and a facsimile of a working pizza oven. This, however, is only the tip of the iceberg.
A highlight of the first episode shows Fielder subliminally giving Kor trivia clues through well-placed actors along their daily walks. If The Rehearsal keeps up this pace of elaborate scheming, it will feature exponentially more wacky concepts than Nathan For You.
Deconstructing Performance
Where The Rehearsal really shines is in how it interrogates the concept of performance, both in daily life and on television. Nathan For You had its fair share of meta moments, with episodes like season three's "Smokers Allowed," where Fielder creates a fake play based on a real bar to get around smoking laws. A precursor to The Rehearsal can actually be seen in Nathan For You's feature-length last episode, "Finding Frances;" before introducing the Bill Gates impersonator, Bill Heath, to his long-lost love Frances, Fielder has him rehearse the interaction with an actress.
It's pretty easy to see how that moment in Nathan For You's finale leads to The Rehearsal, which has cranked up the deconstruction up to eleven. It is even less clear when Fielder is acting in The Rehearsal than it was in Nathan For You, a remarkable achievement, to say the least. Fielder also surreptitiously hires tons of actors without the knowledge of the real people they end up interacting with, such as the woman who pretends to be a birdwatcher so she can study Kor's friend's mannerisms in an interview. All of this doesn't even touch on the driving question of the show, which is "how much can you rehearse for real life?" but we'll need more than one episode to even begin to answer that difficult quandary.
While The Rehearsal's first episode is magnificent, it remains to be seen whether the rest of the show will live up to the high standard set by Nathan For You. However, everything indicates that it will manage to pull this impressive feat off. It was a bit unclear what the show would be based on its first trailer, but now that we have the context of the first episode, it's impossible not to be excited to see how the rest of the season will play out.