In HBO Max’s The Rehearsal, comedian Nathan Fielder uses extravagant resources to allow “ordinary people to prepare for life’s biggest moments by ‘rehearsing’ them in carefully crafted simulations of his own design.” In one of his experiments, Fielder rehearses parenthood, assuming the role of “father.” While this parenting rehearsal spans multiple episodes, the simulation culminates in a metatextual investigation of itself. The ultimate episode, titled “Pretend Daddy,” follows the end of this rehearsal in which Fielder simulates raising a child from zero to eighteen years old in two months. While the show’s premise is to prepare for any risks in a given situation, this episode interrogates the issues the rehearsals themselves can create. Within performance and elaborate fabrications to prepare people for real events, Fielder’s sincerity, introspection, and awareness of the ethical implications of his show emerge. Instead of perpetuating insincerity, it does the opposite; the dedication to illusion creates and emphasizes authenticity.
The episode opens with a birthday party for Fielder’s pretend child, Adam, that captures the limitations of creating a realistic parenting experience using actors. While the party is full of guests, they are background actors, and because of union rules, they are prohibited from speaking; Fielder and Adam celebrate a fake birthday with fake guests in complete silence. This opening scene immediately draws attention to the shortcomings of the rehearsal’s ability to be genuine — the guests respond to Fielder’s conversation about the cake by silently mouthing something neither Fielder nor the audience can understand. The rehearsal is a production within a production primarily filmed with cameras placed throughout the house in which he and Adam live, presenting much of the footage as candid. While the rehearsal itself fails to emulate reality, the self-referential interludes portray Fielder in a very humanistic, vulnerable way. The Rehearsal creates a sense of real anxiety, desperation, and confusion within a heavily produced world.
In “Pretend Daddy,” Fielder’s understanding of the real consequences of rehearsals on the participants dominates the non-rehearsal parts of the episode and invades the fictional narrative. Fielder replaces one of the child actors, Remy, with another, Liam, to coincide with Adam growing up. However, Remy cannot understand that Fielder is not his real dad. Fielder and Remy’s mother, Amber, visibly show their emotions and anxiety about Remy’s conflation between real and fake. This vulnerability is heightened by a voice-over of Fielder asking, “What did I think was going to happen?” In the continuing rehearsal with Liam, Fielder struggles to maintain the facade he constructed, asking: “You know I’m not your real dad, right? We’re just acting, you know that, right?” Fielder’s awareness of the consequences Remy faces pervades the fictional narrative, causing it to break for the first time. In the Variety article “‘The Rehearsal’ Finale: Nathan Fielder Faces the Consequences of His Fantasies,” Ethan Shanfeld considers this scene pivotal. While Shanfeld wonders if Fielder would have a moment of realization of the harm his rehearsal has created, he writes: “But instead, he plunges deeper into the illusion, turning Liam into Remy into Adam in order to rehearse his own rehearsal.” Yet, Fielder’s further commitment to the illusion is an expression of the realization Shanfeld wants. Despite immersing himself “deeper into the illusion,” The Rehearsal does not try to portray this reaction in a polished or seemingly produced way. In diving into simulations, the show conveys Fielder’s real state of mind — trying to understand the damage the only way he knows how: rehearsing.
“Pretend Daddy” contains two narratives, coexisting and bleeding into one another. Narratives within and outside the rehearsal inform each other, with the boundaries between real and pretend merging. This dual narrative integrates the real consequences, the original rehearsal, and the production of more rehearsals to help understand the original one. Shanfeld describes this as “a never-ending Russian doll of theater.” The new rehearsals portray Fielder as spiraling — desperate to understand his own actions. Every real scenario is elaborately replicated, but the show never clouds the real anxieties Fielder cannot seem to reconcile; it expresses them.
In her article on reality TV, “Self-Serve Celebrity,” Laura Grindstaff defines participants in reality shows as ordinary, writing that guests are ordinary not only because they are not actors but “also because they are experiencing some problem or crisis” (Grindstaff 76). Fielder’s show exists in the intersection of real and fake, celebrity and ordinary. While all of the participants in the rehearsal are actors, the actors exist as their real selves as well. Despite Fielder’s celebrity, he grapples with the question of whether he would be a good dad and navigates a crisis in the emotional aftermath of the rehearsal for Remy. Fielder becomes a realistic or “ordinary” figure when wrestling with these issues and showing vulnerability. Fielder occupies a liminal space between celebrity and ordinary, with his real anxiety overshadowing his celebrity persona.
Grindstaff’s concept of emotion work “refers to the act of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling according to latent social guidelines” (Grindstaff 77). In The Rehearsal, every person in the show is engaging in emotion work; Fielder acts as a father, and Remy acts as Fielder’s son. However, when the actor cannot differentiate between emotion work and emotion — falsehood and actuality — the lines between reality and narrative blur. Remy’s “emotion work” becomes emotion; it becomes real. Fielder visits Remy’s house to help unblur these lines, asking Amber if Remy understands the concept of acting; she responds: “I don’t know.” The rehearsals cultivate consequence-free scenarios that prevent their realism, but in working with Remy (outside of the rehearsal), Fielder experiences real consequences. In trying to undo his fake parenting, Fielder engages with Remy as a real person; he has a more accurate parental experience once he stops trying to be a father. As Fielder tells Remy that he was just “a pretend daddy,” Remy says: “I don’t want you to be Nathan, I want you to be ‘daddy.’” The show adds a voiceover of Fielder asking, “What on earth was I doing?” The show highlights the genuine reflecting and processing Fielder undergoes, with the boundaries between real and fake fading away. In this conflict of real and fake emotions, narratives, and characters, The Rehearsal becomes incongruous, simultaneously a sincere fiction and manipulated reality.
Despite being a show premised on performance, The Rehearsal culminates in an introspective and authentic presentation of Fielder in the “Pretend Daddy” episode. The numerous voiceovers convey his inner turmoil: “You may never be able to change what happened, but maybe, with a new perspective, you could try to change yourself;” “What else can you do when you’re trying your best?;” “Forgiving yourself sounds so easy and nice, but how does a person actually do that?” The Rehearsal is uncharacteristically earnest for a reality TV show or a fictional one, and it contains aspects of both. Honesty and vulnerability are ubiquitous in both The Rehearsal and the rehearsal. The commitment to simulation does not negate the show’s truthfulness — it emphasizes it. The HBO Max description of the show asks, “when a single misstep could shatter your entire world, why leave life to chance?” In “Pretend Daddy,” Fielder’s chaotic rehearsals mirror his difficulty coping with a new question. What if the single misstep that could shatter your entire world is the rehearsal made to avoid it?
Works Cited:
Ethan Shanfeld. “‘The Rehearsal’ Finale: Nathan Fielder Faces the Consequences of His Fantasies,” Variety.com, 19 August 2022, https://variety.com/2022/tv/news/the -rehearsal -finale-recap-nathan-fielder-1235346369/
Laura Grindstaff. “Self-Serve Celebrity” from Production Studies: Cultural Studies of Media Industries.
“Pretend Daddy.” The Rehearsal, created by Nathan Fielder, season 1, episode 6, HBOMax, 2022.
“The Rehearsal | Official Website for the HBO Series | HBO.com.” HBO, www.hbo.com/the-rehearsal.