Validate Your Anxieties with Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal

Validate Your Anxieties with Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal

By the end of Nathan Fielder’s landmark show Nathan For You, you got the sense the show was outgrowing its own premise. The series saw small-fry business owners sign up for increasingly insane business makeovers in a parody of the mindset that failing enterprises can find success with counterintuitive, out-of-the-box thinking, revealing in the process a society desperate to try anything for success. But as the series approached its end, it pivoted to featuring offbeat but piercing introspections into our shared human willingness to perform for validation, even if the very idea of performance remained terrifying.

In “The Anecdote,” Nathan coins an outlandish anecdote for a late night show and then reverse-engineers the unlikely tale into existence, so scared is he to be caught lying for attention. In “Smokers Allowed,” Nathan installs a two-seat theater in a dive bar as a legal loophole to allow smoking indoors, and a decision to perfectly replicate a night of drinking leads him to him requesting an actor confess her love for him over and over again. Such a trend continues in Fielder’s follow-up, The Rehearsal, where he allows people who feel ill-prepared for big changes the opportunity to rehearse it in an exact simulacrum of their life. Within convoluted, ludicrous apparati, keen human insecurities are revealed.