The Rehearsal is incredible

Season 1

I watched Season One of The Rehearsal with a feeling of increasing awe and cringey horror.

I had never seen anything like it, and in a way, I still haven’t, as Nathan Fielder has done the impossible and innovated again on his initial, insane, premise.

The bloody-minded free-thinking of The Rehearsal was a riveting unpacking of personal and societal questions being done with resources and craft unthinkable before Peak TV.

My god, that budget

When I showed my wife one of the more extravagant episodes she just gasped and said what I’d also thought when I first started watching this: What a waste! But as you get deeper into it and also place the show in the context of what TV is like in 2025, it starts to seem, well, not reasonable, but I suppose the obscene budget becomes part of the point.

When shows like The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power (gotta love that “…The Rings: The RIngs…” in there 🙄) spend $60,000,000 per episode, building a few good sets and hiring some extras doesn’t seem so crazy. And there’s also an aspect of performance art here. Fielder is building on the conceptual work of people like Andy Kaufman, Tim & Eric, Marina Abramović and even Sacha Baron-Cohen (his docu-comedy work, anyway), but painting with a massive brush. The scale of the solipsism and self-awareness of same is part of the bombast that means you kind of can’t help but take him seriously, or it truly will be a waste.

Season 2

Watching the new season with its introduction of quite a serious topic, each episode is absolutely blowing my mind. Each new turn is thrilling in a way that feels utterly fresh. I’m only a few episodes into the second season, but I can’t wait to finish it.