TV Showcase: The Rehearsal

The “mockumentary” has held a place in my heart since “Borat” (2006).

A mockumentary is a humorous production in the style of a documentary; “real life” participants interact with, usually, a very smart comedian playing a character.

As a format it goes places nobody else can go, gently—or sometimes not so gently—poking fun at life with deadpan humour that I find immensely entertaining.

More recently the UK series “Cunk on Earth” took a few episodes for me to get into, but left me convinced that the production is a work of genius. It’s worth watching the whole thing just for one scene about nuclear weapons—and ABBA.

So when someone suggested that I watch “Nathan For You”, a mockumentary about Nathan Fielder “helping” small businesses—I didn’t waste any time. And I wasn’t disappointed: it’s great. Sometimes silly, sometimes crude; occasionally really, really great.

I’ll just give one example:

In S03E05, “Smokers Allowed”, Nathan has the idea that a bar could profit by inviting people to smoke indoors—taking advantage of a loophole in the law. California’s law on smoking clearly states that smoking indoors is allowed if the smokers are actors in a play. So, it’s easy: declare that the bar is a play, set up a small seating area, and invite in an audience.

So far so good, it’s a creative idea. But it’s what happens next that elevates the episode above a simple joke. They take the detailed footage of the night, and turn it into an actual play: they transcribe every word, hire lookalike actors, rehearse for weeks until it’s word perfect and the timing matches second by second ... and perform that slice of bar life, as a play. Not a very good one, as it turns out. But the effect is somewhat mindbending and really quite artistically satisfying.

The Rehearsal

Having watched and enjoyed all of “Nathan For You” I was pleased to find that Nathan Fielder wrote and produced another show, “The Rehearsal”.

I had been planning to write a post about “Nathan For You”, because it’s really quite special. But “The Rehearsal” blows it away: everything that was silly and occasionally crude in “Nathan For You” has been dropped, leaving something ... not quite a mockumentary, not quite performance art, not quite social sciences research, not quite comedy, but really more than all of the preceding combined.

The premise is, allegedly, simple: that Nathan will help someone prepare for a difficult event in life by rehearsing it with them. The trick with the bar and lookalike actors in “Nathan For You” is expanded on: sets are built, actors are hired, scenarios are explored.

One of the rehearsals forms the backdrop of episodes two to six of the six-episode first season. This rehearsal is ... something else. The idea is to give a woman a preview of what parenting would be like, by having child actors provide her with a fake child. Lots of child actors, working in shifts—starting with babies, and then every so often hopping ahead in time, to toddler, then young child, and through to adulthood.

That by itself is astonishing—as an experiment, as a work of art, as a terrible idea in various ways and maybe a great idea in others.

But then it all starts to get a bit meta. Nathan falls into the “father” role in the “parenthood” rehearsal, while still acting in and producing other episodes of the show. The boundary between reality and fiction is played with—then seriously strained, when he starts using an actor playing himself to review events he took part in from someone else’s point of view—before being thoroughly demolished in ways I won’t spoil.

Wrapup

As I often do I will end with a quote that agrees with me—and why not? It’s my capsule...

> Utterly ridiculous:

>

> Who gave Nathan Fielder the right to creep into the most squeamish parts of my mind then keep going deeper and deeper, blow torching past the house of mirrors I fence social convention in. I’m left thinking “this is nuts” over and over and out loud laughter as he spelunks straight faced with no rope deeper still. It’s like Inception for the realm of the ridiculous. Love it. — waleed-53165 on the IMDb

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