HBO renewed Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal for a second season ahead of the much-talked-about season finale. The show got the minds of the critics and the audience whirring prompting the publishing of opinion pieces and analyses on the show, Nathan Fielder, and his genre of comedy. This, like many others, is another such attempt at dissecting the brain behind some of the best television produced in recent times.
Lately, to the audience of the show, it feels like everything around is Nathan’s world and we’re just living in it. He went a step ahead and created a world for himself to function out of, a world that seems beyond everyone’s grasp. The man behind Nathan Fielder’s on-screen persona seems impenetrable and unpredictable and that is what adds mystique to his work.
The Canadian comic rose to fame for his show on Comedy Central called Nathan for You; spread over four seasons, the show is a parody of business rescue shows. According to the show, Nathan, a business graduate with excellent grades, goes on a mission to help struggling businesses across the country primarily through product innovation and marketing techniques.
In the very first episode, Nathan pledges his services to a struggling frozen yoghurt shop. His idea to increase the footfall? — offer the option of a poo-flavoured frozen yoghurt to the customers. And true to his promise, the store witnesses a bunch of awe-struck slightly rattled townsfolk waiting to try the poo-flavoured frozen yoghurt.
From ghostbusters to ghostwriters, Nathan puts every professional at his disposal to help his clients grow their businesses. Though the bizarre suggestions help lure the audience in, it is the willingness of his participants to execute these suggestions that keeps the audience hooked. Their willingness can be attributed to the camera crew that tag along with Nathan who help in giving the participants an illusion that their interaction is removed from reality.
THE GIST
In the show, The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder created a world for himself to function out of, a world that seems beyond everyone’s grasp. The man behind Nathan Fielder’s on-screen persona seems impenetrable and unpredictable and that is what adds mystique to his work.
He disarms and distances his participants from their arsenal of conventional social cues, making them feel vulnerable and naked in front of the camera.
The Canadian comic also shields his actors from becoming prey to social surveillance with a smart tactic where the audience is unsure if they’ve been asked to act/exaggerate a trait of theirs or play themselves.
Focus on participants
By putting the participants in uncomfortable situations, Nathan brings out a side of the participants that is masked in the real world or chopped off in post-production by the editor. He disarms and distances his participants from their arsenal of conventional social cues, making them feel vulnerable and naked in front of the camera helping Nathan paint an innocent portrait of the participant. He has a tendency to drag a silence for so long that it almost becomes unbearable for the viewer to keep their eyes on the screen.
Nathan (a Jew) has very funny encounters with people of other faiths who talk about Jews in harmful stereotypes that border on antisemitism. What would have otherwise turned into a serious confrontation in the normal world just ends up turning into a painfully awkward conversation, all thanks to him swerving away from the conventional social cues. And through the help of tools like this, Nathan makes sure there’s no space for hate in his work — something reality TV connoisseurs are not used to.
Critique of reality shows
Jeremy Hartwell, a cast member of the Emmy-nominated Netflix show Love Is Blind has filed a lawsuit claiming mistreatment on the set. He alleged that the contestants were forced to film hungry, drunk and sleep-deprived for long hours. All of this only goes to highlight the power imbalance that plagues that sets of reality TV shows. Often a narrative is weaved only in the editor’s room to sensationalise certain behaviours and in the process impinge on the agency of the participants who are almost policied by the cameras. Nathan for You underlines this power imbalance — imagine a frozen yoghurt shop owner agreeing to sell a poo-flavoured product sans cameras, you probably can’t. His shows also do not stress on having a set narrative; they focus on the more mundane things that govern stories.
The obsession with surveillance coupled with constructing a narrative in reality shows is fatal. Contestants of the show, Love Island, Sophie Gradon and Mike Thalassitis died by suicide and the host of the show, Caroline Flack, also met with the same fate. Jake Fincham, the winner of the 2018 season, confessed to have attempted suicide.
Nathan highlights this in The Rehearsal — Angela, 44, who is rehearsing motherhood, acts and talks a certain way when Nathan is around; she reverts back to her original self and has normal conversations with child actors when they are left to their own devices. Dissecting this manufactured reality lies at the core of Nathan’s critique. The Canadian comic also shields his actors from becoming prey to social surveillance with a smart tactic where the audience is unsure if they’ve been asked to act/exaggerate a trait of theirs or play themselves.
But Nathan’s work has its shortcomings. In working on satirising the power dynamics in reality TV shows, the power dynamics on his set have occasionally become skewed with Nathan being gifted a better deck of cards to deal with. In an episode of Nathan for You, Nathan hires 40 cleaning ladies for a turbo clean of sorts. The owner of the business, a 22-year-old Mexican immigrant, reported that she felt humiliated upon coming to know that they were featured in a comedy show.
Initially, she had thought that they were going to interview her about her success. Nathan has regretted this and highlighted that he and his crew check on the participants between scenes but that he is also aware that the power dynamics are such that a “yes” from them does not always come from a comfortable place.
In the initial stage of his comedy career when Nathan was getting started on this observational social experiment like comedy, his mom, a social worker, was befuddled with his work and rightfully so. However, a couple of days later, she came back and informed him that what he was trying to do could be classified under ethnomethodology.
Ethnomethodology is a method of sociological analysis that examines how individuals use everyday conversations to construct a common-sense view of the world. The pioneer of this discipline, Harold Garfinkel, whose writings have had a major impact in the field of social sciences and linguistics also indulged in experiments just like Nathan. In one of his more famous case studies, he asked students to go back to their houses and act as lodgers for a week straight. The result — their parents did not respond in any different way. When we’re so caught up with ourselves going in circles around this common-sense view of the world and taking ourselves seriously, Nathan does a fabulous job at breaking this view and in the process, almost forcing us to reckon with reality.
Critique of child actors
Nathan casts child actors in his bizarre make-believe world exposing us to the not-so-pleasant lives of these children. In an episode of Nathan for You titled ‘Claw of Shame’, Nathan performs a stunt that if gone wrong could be considered a sexual assault with Nathan having to do jail time. While Nathan perfects the stunt, it is bizarre how the parents of the child actors agreed to have their children be a part of such a production.
The same line of critique is intensified in The Rehearsal when in the season finale, we see a six-year-old boy develop an attachment to Nathan and believe that Nathan is indeed his “daddy”. Can six-year-olds understand the complexity of acting — even if they do, is it ethical to subject their brains to such a feat at a young age? Watching Nathan’s shows, one would not draw a favourable opinion on the subject.
In the wake of Jennette McCurdy’s memoir, I’m Glad My Mom Died, when a conversation about child actors’ lives and the logistics and morality of their presence on film sets is being debated, Nathan’s subtle critique adds value to the argument.
While the world of Nathan Fielder might come across as absurd, on deeper inspection, it offers us a method to navigate the world around us by helping us understand the people around us a little better; leaving us a little more in love with the relationships we share, the fleeting moments of reality we experience in them.
