The Cruel and Gaze of Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal”

Nathan Fielder is a master of the look, or, rather, of the Look. That capital-letter stare is the visual center of Fielder’s new series, “The Rehearsal,” on HBO Max. It’s the stare in which parents hold children, teachers hold students, judges hold the accused. It's the look of mastery itself—the optical grip that makes subjects squirm. It’s the look of power. But Fielder’s subjects are volunteers, and they submit to his power in anticipation that he will do them some good. In “The Rehearsal,” Fielder’s idea is that behavior is predictable and that he himself is good at predicting it. His volunteers come to him with a problem; his plan is that, when these real people rehearse, with the help of actors, the scenarios involved in these troubles, they’ll be able to anticipate possible outcomes and thus bring about their desired one. But his idea of rehearsal is no mere verbal joust around a table. He is obsessed with the influence of physical setting on behavior, and on tiny fillips of behavior on large-scale results; he re-creates, as enormous and intricate sets, the subjects’ relevant environments.