| The Rehearsal | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Genre | Comedy |
| Created by | Nathan Fielder |
| Written by |
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| Directed by | Nathan Fielder |
| Starring | Nathan Fielder |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Original language | English |
| No. of seasons | 2 |
| No. of episodes | 12 |
| Production | |
| Executive producers |
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| Running time | 27–58 minutes |
| Production company | Blow Out Productions |
| Original release | |
| Network | HBO |
| Release | July 15, 2022 (2022-07-15) – present |
The Rehearsal is an Americandocu-comedy television series created, written, directed by and starringNathan Fielder. It premiered onHBO on July 15, 2022, to critical acclaim. It was renewed for a second season in August 2022, which premiered on April 20, 2025.[1]
The Rehearsal features Nathan Fielder, as a fictionalized version of himself, helping ordinary people rehearse upcoming difficult conversations or life events through the use ofsets and actors hired to recreate real situations. The situations can be trivial, like confessing to a lie about educational history, or more complex, like raising a child.[2] Fielder commissions extravagant sets with every detail recreated, and hires actors to inhabit these sets and practice differentdialogue trees with his clients dozens of times to try to prepare them for every variable. Information used to train the actors and build the sets is often collected without the subjects' knowledge (this aspect is often played with a comedic effect).[3]
The premise forThe Rehearsal developed from Fielder's seriesNathan for You. In preparation for the earlier series, Fielder and his teamrole-played scenarios to predict how real people might react to his ridiculous suggestions, an exercise that often proved inaccurate. Fielder was inspired by the futility of the human impulse to control one's own future, which he found "really funny."[4]
Some of the humor inThe Rehearsal is derived from its extravagant sets. In the first episode, Fielder constructs a perfect duplicate of the bar in which the subject's difficult conversation is to take place. He also constructs a duplicate of the subject's house to practice their first conversation.[3]
On August 19, 2022, HBO renewed the series for a second season.[5]
The series was first teased in 2019 as part of Fielder's deal with HBO.[6] The titleThe Rehearsal was revealed in June 2021.[7] In June 2022, ateaser was released,[8] and a poster showing a release date of July 15, 2022.[9]
| Season | Episodes | Originally released | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| First released | Last released | |||
| 1 | 6 | July 15, 2022 (2022-07-15) | August 19, 2022 (2022-08-19) | |
| 2 | 6 | April 20, 2025 (2025-04-20) | May 25, 2025 (2025-05-25) | |
| No. overall | No. in season | Title | Directed by | Written by | Original release date | U.S. viewers (millions) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 1 | "Orange Juice, No Pulp" | Nathan Fielder | Nathan Fielder | July 15, 2022 (2022-07-15) | 0.055[10] | |
Nathan Fielder helps Kor Skeete, a trivia-obsessed New Yorker who wants to confess to hisbar trivia team that he lied about having amaster's degree. Nathan reveals an elaborate method of rehearsals involving an actor (K. Todd Freeman) playing a "fake Kor". To help Kor rehearse the difficult conversation with his friend Tricia, Nathan creates simulations of trivia night with a fake Tricia in a full-scale replica of the Alligator Lounge, aBrooklyn bar. Kor overcomes his fears and makes his confession to the real Tricia, who responds with understanding. After Kor wins the trivia competition due to Nathan's trickery, Nathan faces anxiety over how people will react to his deceptions. | |||||||
| 2 | 2 | "Scion" | Nathan Fielder | Nathan Fielder,Carrie Kemper &Eric Notarnicola | July 22, 2022 (2022-07-22) | 0.056[12] | |
Nathan develops a rehearsal for Angela, a woman considering motherhood. Nathan hireschild actors to simulate adopting and caring for a baby and sets her up in a rented farmhouse in rural Oregon. Due to Oregon child protection laws, Nathan's team must covertly switch out the baby every four hours and replace it with a robot baby at night. Seeking a simulated husband, Angela dates Robbin,[11] anumerology-obsessed man who wants to have sex with Angela despite her devout Christian beliefs againstpremarital sex. When Robbin quits the project due to the robot baby's incessant crying, Nathan inserts himself into the experiment as Angela's non-romantic co-parent. | |||||||
| 3 | 3 | "Gold Digger" | Nathan Fielder | Nathan Fielder, Carrie Kemper & Eric Notarnicola | July 29, 2022 (2022-07-29) | 0.117[13] | |
Nathan and Angela accelerate their parenting rehearsal with three-year-old, then six-year-old actors portraying their fake son, "Adam". Angela refuses to participate in Halloween due to her belief inSatanic conspiracies. Nathan balances parenting duties with a rehearsal for Patrick, a man who wants to confront his brother over their late grandfather's will, which bans Patrick from inheriting money if he is dating a "gold digger". The rehearsal occurs in a replicaRaising Cane's restaurant in a warehouse next to the relocated Alligator Lounge. To introduce real emotions to the rehearsal, Nathan stages a scenario to convince Patrick that he could inherit buried gold from the grandfather of Isaac, the actor who plays Patrick's brother. After Patrick has an emotional breakthrough during a rehearsal, he leaves the production and never returns. Nathan narrates that he is envious thatself-deception is easy for some people as he ponders his fake family. | |||||||
| 4 | 4 | "The Fielder Method" | Nathan Fielder | Nathan Fielder, Carrie Kemper & Eric Notarnicola | August 5, 2022 (2022-08-05) | 0.087[14] | |
To recruit actors for his rehearsals, Nathan opens an acting studio in Los Angeles, teaching "the Fielder Method", which involves covertly observing and imitating unaware subjects. Feeling insecure about his own performance, Nathan reenacts the class with actors and a fake Nathan as the teacher while the real Nathan plays the role of Thomas, a student. Nathan makes his students immerse themselves in other people's lives while he immerses himself in Thomas's life, even living in Thomas's home. Nathan returns to Oregon, where his "son", Adam, is now a teenager. Nathan and Joshua, the actor playing Adam, decide that Adam should lash out due to resentment of his absentee father and develop a drug problem, a situation that mirrors Angela's own past. Adam suffers an overdose and is tended to by emergency responders played by Thomas and another Fielder Method graduate. After he runs away from home, the 15-year-old Adam reverts to a 6-year-old since Nathan plans to relive his son's earlier years. | |||||||
| 5 | 5 | "Apocalypto" | Nathan Fielder | Nathan Fielder, Carrie Kemper & Eric Notarnicola | August 12, 2022 (2022-08-12) | 0.069[15] | |
Nathan decides to practice his own assertiveness in relationships by challenging Angela over their son's religious upbringing. Angela, a fervent Christian, refuses to allow Adam to be raised in Nathan's Jewish faith, so Nathan secretly brings his son to lessons with a tutor in Judaism under the pretense of swimming lessons. Seeking solace outside the house, Nathan opens his replica Alligator Lounge to the public under the name Nate's Lizard Lounge. The co-parents argue over a comedy skit featuring six-year-old Adam as "Dr. Fart" and a joke about eating feces, which Angela claims is a Satanic practice. Nathan rehearses the confrontations with a fake Angela, and in one scenario, she harshly criticizes Nathan's emotional detachment and questions the ethics of the entire production. However, in their real final confrontation, Angela simply decides to quit the rehearsal. Nathan continues to raise Adam, now as a single parent. | |||||||
| 6 | 6 | "Pretend Daddy" | Nathan Fielder | Nathan Fielder, Carrie Kemper & Eric Notarnicola | August 19, 2022 (2022-08-19) | 0.117[16] | |
Nathan stages a ninth birthday party for Adam, but faces a problem when Remy, one of the child actors who played Adam at age six, becomes attached to Nathan, calling him "daddy" even after his scenes are over. Remy's mother explains that her son might have trouble understanding the difference between acting and reality. To discover what went wrong, Nathan repeats Remy's scenes with different actors including Liam (a nine-year-old Adam actor), an adult actor, and a mannequin. He then explores what might have happened if Angela had stayed with him and meets with the real Angela, who urges him to forgive himself, as her religious beliefs state. In an attempt to truly understand the connection between parent and child, Nathan stages a new scenario in which he is Remy's mother Amber and Liam portrays Remy. They re-create the experience of appearing onThe Rehearsal and becoming attached to "pretend daddy" Nathan. After coming to the emotional realization that they should not have done the show, Nathan as Amber seemingly breaks character and tells the fake Remy, "I'm your dad." | |||||||
| No. overall | No. in season | Title [17] | Directed by | Written by [18] | Original release date [19] | U.S. viewers (millions) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 7 | 1 | "Gotta Have Fun" | Nathan Fielder | Nathan Fielder,Carrie Kemper, Adam Locke-Norton &Eric Notarnicola | April 20, 2025 (2025-04-20) | 0.129[20] | |
Nathan Fielder studies airliner black box transcripts in which the first officer feels too intimidated to challenge the captain, leading to fatal crashes due topilot error. He discusses this withJohn Goglia, a formerNational Transportation Safety Board member, who had once recommendedroleplay simulation to improvepilot communication. Nathan considers the dilemma of balancing his "somewhat sincere" effort to improve air safety against expectations that he is making a comedy show. Nathan meets with Moody, an airline first officer who is willing to participate in simulations. When his film crew is denied entry at a terminal while shadowing Moody at work, Nathan builds a partial re-creation of theGeorge Bush Intercontinental Airport terminal, staffed with actors who use the Fielder Method to imitate real employees. There, Moody role-plays interactions with an actor playing a captain. To test Moody's assertiveness, Nathan arranges a conversation between Moody and his girlfriend Cindy, a Starbucks barista whom he worries is being hit on by customers. They confront their relationship issues in a simulated cockpit with Cindy dressed as a captain, an exercise which ends awkwardly. | |||||||
| 8 | 2 | "Star Potential" | Nathan Fielder | Nathan Fielder, Carrie Kemper, Adam Locke-Norton & Eric Notarnicola | April 27, 2025 (2025-04-27) | 0.111[21] | |
Nathan createsWings of Voice, a fake singing competition show to test airline co-pilots by asking them to judge and reject auditioning contestants. The scenario is inspired by an emotionally taxing job Nathan himself once performed as a junior producer onCanadian Idol. After Nathan asks the rejected contestants to rate their judges' performance, he tries to emulate Mara'D, the co-pilot with the highest likeability score. Mara'D demonstrates her ability to deflect unwanted personal attention from Jeff, a captain who has been banned from numerous dating apps. Nathan also explores his own failure to assertively confront the streaming serviceParamount+ over their removal of the second episode of the third season ofNathan for You due to the inclusion ofSummit Ice Apparel and their classification ofantisemitism as a "sensitive" topic after theGaza war began in 2023. To continue his attempts at performing sincerity, Nathan gives an inspiring speech to a teenage girl who was rejected at the audition. | |||||||
| 9 | 3 | "Pilot's Code" | Nathan Fielder | Nathan Fielder, Carrie Kemper, Adam Locke-Norton & Eric Notarnicola | May 4, 2025 (2025-05-04) | 0.085[22] | |
Nathan helps Bogdan and Monique, a couple who havecloned their late dog Achilles, but are unsatisfied that the clones behave differently. Nathan places the cloned dogs into a re-creation of the original Achilles' 2011-era upbringing. Applying this concept to human behavior, Nathan uses himself as a test subject to replicate the personality of heroic pilotSully Sullenberger. In a simulation that Nathan acknowledges may seem "weird," he relives portions of Sully's life from infancy, created with oversized sets, puppets, stilt-walking actors, and robots. Knowing that pilots often avoid mental health diagnoses out of fear of losing their license, Nathan examines passages fromSully's memoir, claiming that Sully likely avoided discussing his emotional struggles and listened to music on his iPod to cope with repressed emotions. Nathan presents a theory that Sully could have been listening to "Bring Me to Life" by one of his favorite bandsEvanescence during the "Miracle on the Hudson" landing. | |||||||
| 10 | 4 | "Kissme" | Nathan Fielder | Nathan Fielder, Carrie Kemper, Adam Locke-Norton & Eric Notarnicola | May 11, 2025 (2025-05-11) | 0.102[23] | |
To explore interpersonal communication with pilots, Nathan begins a project around Colin, a first officer who finds dating awkward. Nathan introduces an exercise he calls "The Pack" in which a crowd of actors surround Colin and mimic his actions as he goes through simulations of romantic encounters. Nathan secretly encourages actors in the pack to pursue Colin in real life if they have a genuine attraction. Colin goes on a date with one of the actresses named Emma, and Nathan creates five copies of Colin's apartment while casting actors to rehearse their relationship. The actor couples are encouraged to improvise kissing, aided by anintimacy coordinator. When Colin and Emma's relationship stalls over reading the signals for a first kiss, Nathan casts them in a fictional scene that ends with a kiss, explaining that the artifice of acting gives people permission to do things they normally would not. This culminates in Colin kissing Emma (albeit on the cheek). | |||||||
| 11 | 5 | "Washington" | Nathan Fielder | Nathan Fielder, Carrie Kemper, Adam Locke-Norton & Eric Notarnicola | May 18, 2025 (2025-05-18) | 0.079[24] | |
Nathan rehearses a hearing of theCongressional Subcommittee on Aviation, where he presents his findings on pilot communication. As a comedian, Nathan struggles with appearing serious to Congress, so he decides to emphasize online discourse about how season one ofThe Rehearsal resonated with theautistic experience. He hopes to secure a meeting with CongressmanSteve Cohen, an autism advocate and Ranking Member of the Aviation Subcommittee. Nathan ingratiates himself withDoreen Granpeesheh of theCenter for Autism and Related Disorders to position himself as a "thought leader" in the field, though he tries to deflect any implication that he himself may be autistic. Going into Congressman Cohen's office without rehearsing, Nathan proposes that pilots should participate in an acting exercise before each flight, which would psychologically give permission for first officers to speak up in the event of a crisis. Cohen is not convinced, and suggests that such exercises should be left at the discretion of individual airlines. | |||||||
| 12 | 6 | "My Controls" | Nathan Fielder | Nathan Fielder, Carrie Kemper, Adam Locke-Norton & Eric Notarnicola | May 25, 2025 (2025-05-25) | 0.088[26] | |
Over the course of two years, Nathan obtains acommercial pilot's license and trains in asimulator to fly aBoeing 737. Though he is not experienced enough to obtain thelicense to operate airline flights, with a commercial rating Nathan is allowed to fly passengers and recruits a full cabin of actors willing to simulate a regularly scheduled airline flight. Because pilots must disclose mental health conditions, Nathan undergoes afMRI brain scan to potentially detect anxiety and autism. Fearing that his flight might be cancelled, Nathan claims to not have those conditions before learning his test results. To document problems with pilot communication, Nathan films himself in the cockpit with his first officer Aaron, an experienced pilot with aspirations to be a TV producer. Nathan successfully pilots the 737 fromSan Bernardino International Airport to the Nevada border and back, emerging to applause from the actors. This flight has been called by some "The Miracle over the Mojave".[25] Later, Nathan shares that he has been occasionally working as aferry pilot for an aviation transport company relocating 737s around the world and seemingly declining to learn the results of his brain scan. He claims to be fine because "no one is allowed in the cockpit if there's something wrong with them." | |||||||
The series has received critical acclaim, with some praising it as one of the best new series of 2022. For the first season, thereview aggregator websiteRotten Tomatoes reported a 95% approval rating with an average rating of 9.4/10, based on 58 critic reviews. The website's critics consensus reads, "The Rehearsal gives Nathan Fielder carte blanche to take his absurdist comedy to the limit, which he pushes even further past with deadpan aplomb in what might be his most uncomfortably funny feat yet."[27]Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 86 out of 100 based on 23 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[28]
The Rehearsal appeared in the top ten on numerous publications' "Best of 2022" lists, including first forIndieWire,The Ringer, andScreenCrush, among others.[29]
For the second season, Rotten Tomatoes reported a 97% approval rating based on 35 critic reviews. The website's critics consensus reads, "Never fear, Nathan Fielder is here to solve air travel safety and further his frustrated quest for human connection in a secondRehearsal that's just as audacious, cringey, and uproariously funny as the first."[30] Metacritic assigned a score of 86 out of 100 based on 19 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[17]
InThe New York Times Critic's Pick review,James Poniewozik wrote that "the show has a philosophical core: Is it ever possible to truly understand another person?"[31]Vox's Alissa Wilkinson likewise called the show "an excellent reminder that we know much less about others than we think we do," and compared it to the writings ofLeslie Jamison andMartin Buber.[32]
The show's blurring of simulation and reality have drawn comparisons to theCharlie Kaufman filmSynecdoche, New York and theTom McCarthy novelRemainder.[33][34] The series has been described as aspiritual successor toNathan for You, since both shows share a premise of Fielder helping average people in humorous ways.Vulture described Fielder's "willingness to screw with people" and put them in situations that might embarrass them or cause them to do things that are out of character being the core thread of his work.[3]
In a review forThe New Yorker, criticRichard Brody characterized the show as disingenuous, taking this "willingness to screw with people" too far. Brody contended that while Fielder is focused on exerting control over his subjects, his "cruel and arrogant gaze" overshadows the series' comedic and dramatic elements.[35] However, Brody embraced moments in season 2 as achieving true artistic excellence.[36]
Many critics viewed the show as a critique of the exploitive and disingenuous nature of reality television, with writer Israel Daramola ofLos Angeles Review of Books calling it "a commentary on...the inherent phoniness of reality television as well as the faults and constrictions of acting as representation of real life."[37]
The series' central idea of rehearsing and performing social interactions resonated with many autistic viewers, who viewed it as an analogy formasking.[38][39]Variety writer Daniel D'Addario highlighted the series' ultimate message that "all of us are performing, all the time."[34] Fielder references the article in season two.[40]
| Award | Year | Category | Nominee(s) | Result | Ref. |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cinema Eye Honors | 2022 | Heterodox Award | Nathan Fielder | Nominated | [41] |
| Gotham Independent Film Awards | 2022 | Breakthrough Nonfiction Series | Nathan Fielder, Dave Paige, Dan McManus, and Christie Smith | Nominated | [42] |
| Independent Spirit Awards | 2023 | Best New Non-Scripted or Documentary Series | Nathan Fielder, Dave Paige, Dan McManus, Christie Smith,Carrie Kemper, andEric Notarnicola | Won | [43] |
| Primetime Emmy Awards | 2025 | Outstanding Directing for a Comedy Series | Nathan Fielder(for "Pilot's Code") | Nominated | [44] [45] |
| Outstanding Writing for a Comedy Series | Nathan Fielder, Carrie Kemper, Adam Locke-Norton, and Eric Notarnicola(for "Pilot's Code") | Nominated | |||
| Primetime Creative Arts Emmy Awards | 2025 | Outstanding Picture Editing for a Single-Camera Comedy Series | Adam Locke-Norton(for "My Controls") | Nominated | |
| Stacy Moon(for "Pilot's Code") | Nominated | ||||
| Television Critics Association Awards | 2023 | Outstanding Achievement in Reality Programming | The Rehearsal | Nominated | [46] |
