HBO’s ‘The Rehearsal’ Recap, Episode 1: A Painful Confession

HBO’s The Rehearsal, the hotly anticipated new project from Nathan Fielder, following the brilliant, absurd Nathan For You, is difficult to explain.

Fielder has an almost supernatural gift for elevating any mildly awkward situation into unbearable, thermonuclear cringe; you get the sense that social anxiety, along with the powerful presence of the camera, is what propelled so many of the ridiculous situations forward in Nathan For You; sometimes, it’s just easier to play along.

The Rehearsal plays like a physical manifestation of intense social anxiety, in which Fielder “helps” his subjects prepare for an important moment in their lives, by practicing with lookalike actors and perfectly replicated sets, attempting to simulate every single possible outcome from the incoming conversation.

Episode 1 follows Kor, a Brooklyn teacher with a passion for pub trivia. The problem is, Kor’s trivia team all believe he has a master’s degree, and Kor has let the lie continue for so long that simply clarifying the situation feels like a Herculean task; he’s worried about revealing the truth to one teammate in particular, Tricia, even going so far as to anticipate a violent response.

Hence, Fielder proposes his plan for a rehearsal, revealing that he himself has prepared for this exact moment with Kor, having exchanged dialogue with an actor he hired to play him, inside a perfect replica of Kor’s house, after sending a team to document the house interior under the guise of a gas company checking for a leak. After hearing this revelation, Kor, somehow, agrees to participate in The Rehearsal.

The situation continues to escalate from there, in typical Fielder fashion; a perfect replica of Kor’s pub is constructed and an actor is hired to play Tricia, able to mimic Tricia’s mannerisms after she manages to snag an interview with the real Tricia (in which she admits to deceiving her, to test how she might react to Kor’s eventual confession).

It’s wonderfully ridiculous, a meta-joke steeped in layers of irony, but with a real dilemma at its core; as the episode continues and Kor experiences every conceivable outcome, it’s impossible not to empathize with the guy, to really root for him to nail this confession, made all the more hilarious by the incredibly low stakes.

At one point, Fielder simulates a disastrous outcome, with Tricia’s lookalike ending their friendship on the spot, and the surrounding extras (hired to play pub dwellers), participating on the pile on, berating Kor for not having a master’s degree. Kor’s quiet, devastated reaction highlights how real it feels for him – on some level, this is the response he seems to be expecting.

When the moment finally comes, the meeting starts off exactly how Kor expected, with Tricia relishing the opportunity to complain about her life, and Kor lending a sympathetic ear. As the time draws near for the big confession, the tension is surprisingly high – Kor almost chickens out, but finally finds the courage to tell the truth. Amusingly, Tricia does indeed appear to judge him for lying about his education, but is forced to be kind in the face of Kor’s lengthy, earnest explanation.

Kor and Tricia even win the pub quiz, an outcome which Fielder ensured would happen, by subliminally implanting every single trivia answer in Kor’s memory; the two walk through a series of strange events set up in advance by Fielder, all designed to highlight the necessary information.

The scene is one of the comedic highlights of the episode, but also, a source of strange discomfort – Kor clearly takes these trivia nights very seriously, and doesn’t want to cheat when Fielder suggests it. Fielder outright manipulates Kor into cheating, and the episode cleverly acknowledges the grey morality around the situation.

While Fielder hasn’t quite reached the heights of mainstream recognition, it’s amusing that Kor doesn’t instantly recognize him from Nathan For You, considering his specialty is television trivia. But Fielder always manages to find oddballs and eccentrics for his experiments, and sometimes, there’s a sense of unease watching these people undergo elaborate pranks, seemingly unable to recognize when they’re the butt of the joke.

When Fielder admits to deceiving Kor, the camera cuts to the reaction of an actor playing Kor, who Fielder has rehearsed with, and he delivers an intense performance, grievously wounded and embarrassed. It’s a genuinely shocking moment that calls into question everything Fielder is doing, has ever done – how do these people react when they watch the show and realize how they’ve been portrayed?

Viewers were likely rooting for Kor, but we were laughing at him too. Did Fielder actually help Kor, or did he just humiliate him for the sake of entertainment? It’s unclear from the first episode, but it feels like The Rehearsal is going to outright acknowledge this question and maybe follow up with its subjects; shattering the fourth wall is definitely Nathan Fielder’s thing.

It’s only the first episode, and already, The Rehearsal feels just as unique and unpredictable as Nathan For You, while incorporating the underlying darkness that was always present in that show, but never acknowledged before.