Nathan Fielder Is a God

This article contains spoilers for the entire first season of The Rehearsal

It is said that in television, “the screenwriter is god.” This is meant as a comparison to film, where the director (at least in the modern age), exerts control over every aspect of production. Meanwhile, on a television show, the most important decisions are made in the writers’ room—the arc of the season, how various characters will change and develop, etc. while the director is more a functionary who comes on to keep the process moving within the bounds already set by the show runners .

In his new series The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder is not only one of the writers, but also the creator, an executive producer, director, and star. It is his vision insofar as any collaborative art form can be the vision of one person. It also, sneakily, feints at being a docuseries. Like his previous show, Nathan For You, Fielder is technically working in the Reality TV series genre, but he’s designed his premises, on-screen persona, and editing to lead to an absurdly comic result. However, while Nathan For You would rest on joke premises like how far people would go for a minor rebate on gasoline, The Rehearsal is a far more complicated beast about what it means to create “Reality” television.

The show’s first episode both establishes the premise while also serving as a bit of a misdirect. In the show’s premiere, “Orange Juice, No Pulp,” Nathan offers to help Kor, a man who is afraid of telling one of his bar trivia teammates, Tricia, that he’s been lying about having an advanced degree. Like Nathan For You, Fielder offers a complicated solution for what should be a simple problem. Rather than merely coaching Kor on ways he could break the news to Tricia, Nathan goes to the expense of building an exact replica of the bar where trivia is held, and then having Kor rehearse different outcomes within that bar with an actor playing Tricia. That way, when the time finally comes for Kor to confess at bar trivia, he’ll have played through the scenario and be more at ease.

However, the second episode, “Scion”, is where the show starts to show its cards. This time, the subject is Angela, an evangelical Christian who wants to prepare for life raising a child. Her vision is to raise the child with a guy, and so Nathan sees if the man she’s been dating may be interested in participating in the project. When that falls through, Nathan inserts himself into the show to be the co-parent with Angela. From here, the show starts to break away from the pilot—an absurd recreation to solve a simple problem—and instead becomes a twisty hall of mirrors that seems to draw its inspiration from such films as Real Life (1979), Close-Up (1990), Synecdoche, New York (2008), and mother! (2017).

The Biblical Undertones of The Rehearsal

Full credit to Alissa Wilkinson over at Vox for breaking out the religious subtext of The Rehearsal. If it were just that the child that Nathan and Angela were raising was named “Adam,” the read may be a stretch, but as Wilkinson points out, the show is littered with biblical allusions:

Wilkinson’s article only covers the first four episodes, but I imagine her suspicions would only be deepened by the show’s fifth episode, “Apocalypto”, which draws its title from the Mel Gibson movie of the same name. In this episode, Nathan decides that it’s important for “Adam” to understand Judaism and starts taking him to classes behind Angela’s back since he knows she won’t support any upbringing other than Christian Evangelicalism.1 The episode ends with Angela leaving the project and Nathan fully taking over the raising of Adam. In the finale, Nathan goes full “God-mode,” by changing aspects of the project at will in some dogged pursuit to get it “right.”

The dramatic tension of the entire enterprise is that Nathan, as showrunner, can change just about anything he wants. Although there are budget limitations, nothing can stop him from inserting himself into the project, observing and imitating others, and creating elaborate scenarios for his subjects to follow. And yet, we’re in “reality” television, so shouldn’t there be rules? Aren’t we supposed to be capturing something authentic? What The Rehearsal appears to argue is that its entire premise (and by proxy, reality television) is built on artifice. The show constantly shows us all the strings being pulled, and yet that ends up sending us through the looking glass to where we can’t help but wonder if every single person on the show is an actor. And yet, I’m afraid, that’s too easy of an out. In Fielder’s vision, he’s the only one who has control, so it doesn’t really matter if anyone on the show is a subject or plant. And the way he wields that control paints Fielder as a fickle, indecisive, and callous creator.

The Towering Anti-Hero

In his 2019 book Audience of One, New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik’s book about the rise of Trump as television programming changed, Poniewozik notes the dual rise of the anti-hero and reality TV competitions in the early to mid 2000s. When there were only three network channels, programming had to be built for the widest audience possible, which made for likable, inoffensive programming. With the rise of cable, there was permission for show runners to make more daring content. This breaks through in 1999 with The Sopranos, which featured a cast of deeply flawed characters led by the anti-hero Tony Soprano, a self-centered mafia captain who begins to get panic attacks. From there, you can see the popularity of other anti-heroes such as Vic Mackey on The Shield, Walter White on Breaking Bad, and Don Draper on Mad Men among others.

Concurrently, you have reality television competitions where producers and editors whittle down participants into easy archetypes. Inevitably, there comes the player who “isn’t there to make friends,” which is a strange assertion into any kind of reality, as most of us would like to make friends. If I walked into any room and proclaimed, “I’m not here to make friends,” I doubt I would stick around for very long. But the incentives of television make that type a of character compelling to watch, so they not only stick around but become icons (e.g. Richard Hatch on Survivor or Omarosa on The Apprentice). Hence, an anti-hero for reality television.

While recent television typically depicts the anti-hero as a venal and destructive presence, the recent trend of anti-heroes is really a morally ambiguous or immoral lead2, and in that way, the Nathan Fielder of The Rehearsal fits the bill.

It should be noted before I go further that I don't think we can necessarily take the Nathan Fielder of The Rehearsal as the one who exists outside the show anymore than the Albert Books of Real Life is the one who exists outside the movie. Instead, they're self-parodies who have some basis in reality, but whose on-screen persona exists to satirize their presence in the art they're creating. While it's tempting to view The Rehearsal as autobiographical or confessional, I feel like that puts us on uneasy ground since we don't know that much about Fielder's personal life.

At best, I feel like the text supports a reading of Fielder critiquing the form he’s working in, calling attention to its artifice, and damning the person of the creator. In the reality of The Rehearsal, Fielder is God. He has total control, and he directs the story. What makes it increasingly twisted as how Fielder as God-figure is so desperate for human connection but afraid to make any kind of leap. He’s omnipotent while also seeking omniscience, trying to play out every scenario in search of a perfection of human relations that are, by their very nature, imperfect.

Nathan’s increasing desperation reaches its climax in the season finale, “Pretend Daddy” (a title that could derisively be applied to a god figure). By this point, Nathan has cut Angela loose (even though this project was supposed to be for her benefit) and is now pretending to be a single father to Adam. The episodes gets darker and darker as one of the child actors, Remy, who plays Adam wants to treat Nathan as a real father3. Nathan tries to emphasize that he’s not the child’s real father, but then begins to wonder how he could have approached the relationship "better." He goes over to the actor's home with a slightly older child actor, Liam, under the auspices of giving Remy a playmate, but when Nathan and Liam leave, Nathan asks Liam, "Did you get everything you needed?" The trip was research for more rehearsals.

To make it even more twisted, Nathan, in an attempt to view Remy through a parent’s eyes, takes on the role of Remy’s mother, Amber. Liam and Nathan finally have a scene where there appears to be an emotional breakthrough, but when “Remy” says, “I love you, Mommy”, Nathan corrects him and says, “I’m your daddy.” Liam is confused, but Nathan reasserts that he’s no longer “mommy” but “daddy.” Within the confines of the scene, Nathan ultimately honors his own ego by tearing down the reality of the scene they’ve built for one that better suits his emotional whims.

Taken at face value, Nathan is a manipulative monster who, in his attempts to forge human connections ultimately shows what he really desires is the ability to satisfy his own emotional insecurity. On the surface, The Rehearsal seems like it refutes its own concept where rehearsals—the artifice of “practicing” for real life—will lead to any kind of honest reckoning. The first episode already shows the flaw of the plan as everything done for Kor’s benefit is ridiculously elaborate and unnecessary as Tricia accepts Kor’s confession without much fuss.

But beneath the surface, Fielder has created something much darker—his own fantasyland where he’s immune from consequences so that he never has to face an emotional situation he thinks he can’t handle. If the situation goes wrong, rather than addressing it, he can simply scrap it and try again as he does with the teenage Adam who goes back to being a child or by removing Angela without detailing how a child would react if their mother suddenly disappeared. Any time the emotions of another person comes up, Nathan moves to avoid it by retreating into rehearsals or changing the nature of the project.

Nathan Fielder isn’t an anti-hero in the sense that he’s going to strangle a guy on his daughter’s tour of college campuses or rob a money train or build a meth empire. However, there’s something disturbingly grandiose in his anti-heroism. While the drama of an anti-hero series is fueled by how the anti-hero will address the various obstacles that come his way and the need to dispel them through treachery or violence, Fielder can simply wave his hands and change the world to his liking. The tragedy at the center of The Rehearsal is that our humanity is defined by the power we lack, the conflicts we’re forced to address, and the messy outcomes we can’t predict. Nathan Fielder is a god seeking humanity he’ll never attain.