I’ve always felt that sincerity is overrated,” narrates comedian Nathan Fielder in season two of The Rehearsal. “It just ends up punishing those who can’t perform it as well as others.” No throwaway gag could better capture Fielder’s paradoxical obsession with the concept of performance. Across his career, from prank show host to prestige showrunner, it seems that Fielder has developed increasingly inventive and confronting ways of asking the question: how can we know what’s real and what’s not?
The Canadian disrupter’s bizarre HBO docuseries probed at questions of farce versus authenticity in its first season. Its opening episodes saw Fielder help people prepare for difficult real-life situations by staging elaborate “rehearsals” so that they could practice in advance. The season is really impossible to neatly summarise, though, because over the course of its six instalments, Fielder adds cumulative layers of rehearsal and misdirection, until the whole thing descends into a strange, metafictional sort of performance art. It’s clear that what we’re watching isn’t “reality TV” in any meaningful sense, and trying to read it as such becomes exhausting.
