The New Yorker:

The first season of Nathan Fielder’s mind-bending show seemed to exhaust all possibilities for its conceit. But the second is, somehow, even more berserk than the first.

By Gideon Lewis-Kraus

Nathan Fielder, like Andy Kaufman before him, makes performance-art comedy that does not only poke fun at the world but experimentally perturbs it, and he plies this trade in the buffer zone between reality and artifice. He presents himself as something of a Kaspar Hauser figure for the age of artificial intelligence, a foundling raised not by wolves but by an advanced and affectless race of extraterrestrial anthropologists. His object is to isolate and mimic the rudiments of human sociability. Fielder’s intuition is that many putatively normal people share his own bewildered dread of everyday interactions, which are at once governed by established, if opaque, social norms and subject to unnerving unpredictability. Children learn to tame uncertainty through repetition: they replay interactions in an effort to interpret and control the varied challenges of their environment. Adults who adopt this tactic are diagnosed with repetition compulsion. Actors, however, transform such neurotic behavior into the virtue of professionalism, and, as such, he sees their work as a broadly applicable practice for any civilian beset by doubt and equivocation. This is the premise of the “The Rehearsal,” Fielder’s attempt to deploy perfect facsimiles of actual environments—night-life venues, apartments—to serve as human sandboxes for dry-run iterations. The whole thing has only worked because Fielder shows an unflagging commitment to the bit. His transformation of artifice into authenticity has been rendered credible by the delighted, deadpan alacrity with which he set vast sums of HBO’s money on fire.

Fielder promises his participants lives of greater freedom and ease: to playact the game of life in a controlled, low-stakes setting would prepare them to meet actual interactions with newly relaxed spontaneity. In the first, relatively sane example, a New Yorker named Kor frets that his pub-trivia team will excommunicate him if he comes clean about the fact that he does not, in fact, have a master’s degree; Fielder not only hires an actor to play Kor’s friend and teammate, he re-creates an entire Brooklyn bar to give their fake conversations an asymptotic proximity to the real. By the end of the season, Fielder has taken his approach to its logically batshit conclusion: he scaffolds the entirety of a child’s development from infancy to adolescence.

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