The Rehearsal

The Rehearsal is an American docu-comedy television series created, written, directed by and starring Nathan Fielder. It premiered on HBO on July 15, 2022, to critical acclaim. In August 2022, the series was renewed for a second season. Premise The Rehearsal features Nathan Fielder helping ordinary people rehearse difficult conversations or life events through the use of sets 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. Fielder commissions extravagant sets with every detail recreated. He hires actors to inhabit these sets and practice different dialogue trees with his clients dozens of times. Information used to train the actors and build the sets is often collected without the subjects' knowledge. Production The premise for The Rehearsal grew out of Fielder's series Nathan for You. In preparation for the earlier series, Fielder and his team would role-play scenarios to predict how real people would 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 to be "really funny." Some of the humor in The 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.