“It was a work of art, and it was just real life”: Watching The Rehearsal

Abstract

Few television programs both meditate on and rupture the concepts of reality and representation as much as The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder’s genre-bending docu-comedy that aired on HBO in the summer of 2022. On the surface, the series purports to offer an odd variant of self-help reality TV: Nathan finds people looking to tackle challenging experiences, and stages a “rehearsal” for them to work through the situation in a low-stakes simulation before tackling it in real life. But as it plays out, the series is a deeply troubling work of media, dramatizing its own ethical failings in a way that invites us to experience both admiration and outrage at its manipulations. This video rehearses these ideas through an experimental format.