Nathan Fielder, whose four-season series “Nathan for You” saw him “aiding” struggling small businesses with strange promotional ideas like poo-flavored frozen yogurt or rebranding a realtor as a “ghost realtor” whose properties are guaranteed to be spook-free, is back. “The Rehearsal,” premiering Friday on HBO, takes off from the idea that critical events can be prepared for, that “if you plan for every variable, a happy outcome doesn’t have to be left to chance.” Like the earlier show, and the myriad reality shows it half-mimics, it is presented as a sort of social experiment, and, in that it puts real people into artificial situations in order to elicit real reactions, even feelings, in some cracked way it is.
As in “Nathan for You,” part of the joke — perhaps the whole of the joke — is the length to which Fielder will go to achieve his ends, the elaborate, often expensive stratagems he employs, requiring the witting or unwitting participation of many hands. We are sometimes going to laugh at his subjects, at the amazing things people will agree to or the yards of wool that can be pulled over their eyes. But Fielder, who narrates and appears on camera and is personally, sometimes deeply involved in each project — never more so than in “The Rehearsal” — is the implicit subject of his work. And sometimes the explicit, as in the “Nathan for You” episode “The Anecdote” in which, fearful of being a dull guest on “Jimmy Kimmel,” he researches and invents the “perfect” story and then reverse engineers events to make it technically true.
“The Rehearsal” might have its roots in the final episode of “Nathan for You,” “Finding Frances,” an extended odyssey in which Fielder sets out to reconnect Bill Heath, a septuagenarian actor who imitated Bill Gates in that show’s second season, with a lost love. In one scene, he employs an actress to role-play with Heath to help predict what a reunion might look like; when that does not seem to go well, Fielder has Heath play the part of Frances. (He has a wig handy.) Role-play — and the surprising emotions it can call up — is the essence of “The Rehearsal,” which feels like an attempt to match the relative seriousness and ambition and artistry of “Finding Frances.” To be sure, any one of us, faced with a worrisome encounter, may obsessively imagine how it will go, think over what we’ll say. It’s that universality that gives “The Rehearsal” some relatable heft.
