The Rehearsal, review — Nathan Fielder creates The Truman Show for the socially anxious

All the world’s a stage in The Rehearsal, a daring, vertiginously high-concept new documentary-cum-reality series in which individuals are offered the chance to act out daunting social situations before they actually happen.

This innovative HBO original puts a spin on the influential Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman’s theory that a person is essentially a “performed character . . . not an organic thing [but] a dramatic effect”. Here participants become like method actors in reverse, using a theatrical framework to prepare for future scenarios in their real lives.

The creator of both the actual show and these “pre-enactments” is the comedian Nathan Fielder. As someone who’s talked openly about his own experiences of debilitating social anxiety, Fielder is driven by the question of what might be gained (and possibly lost) if doubt could be extracted from everyday life — if torturous ruminations about how things might play out could be transformed into known quantities.

The fact that The Rehearsal is airing on Sky Comedy in the UK is a little misleading. Although the series is funny in an absurd kind of way, this isn’t an elevated gimmick that mines cheap laughs from people’s discomfort. It’s a searching and revealing look at human behaviour.

The level of world-building that Fielder undertakes to replicate reality is nothing short of The Truman Show. The first episode follows a 50-year-old man who’s consumed with dread about having to tell a potentially judgemental friend that he lied about having a masters’ degree to join their beloved trivia team. Not leaving anything to chance, Fielder builds a full working replica of the bar where the confession is due to take place and hires an actress to research and play the friend. They run over the evening ad nauseum, workshopping what to say, how to move and how to respond to every foreseeable eventuality. Watching how the real meet-up unfolds is both disquieting and oddly cathartic.

The scale of the simulations only increase from the second episode, which introduces a series-spanning arc involving a woman who experiences what 18 years of parenthood might feel like in just two months using a roster of child actors.

The show naturally and compellingly raises a host of ethical considerations — not least when Fielder attempts to trigger authentic emotional reactions from those taking part in the rehearsals by blurring the lines between reality and fabrication outside of them. But any accusations that he’s acting in bad faith are at least partially assuaged by how often he turns the focus onto his personal fears and feelings. In an ingenious mise en abyme, we see Fielder using the same process to prepare for his own interactions with his participants.

Eventually, we begin to wonder whether the show is in fact more about Fielder’s own efforts to make sense of a world he finds bewildering. As he takes a more active role in the simulations, the question of what is real and what is fake becomes increasingly thistly. For a series that’s ostensibly about eliminating uncertainty, The Rehearsal is as slippery, challenging and surprising as TV (reality or otherwise) gets.

★★★★★

On Sky Comedy from August 24 at 9pm; available on Now in the UK and HBO Max in the US

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