'The Rehearsal' Is the TV Event of the Decade

There is a special, unique, and increasingly rare thrill in watching a television series where week-to-week, you have absolutely no idea what you’re in for—a show that dares to defy the formula and familiarity built into TV’s DNA. Back in 2022, Nathan Fielder achieved this feat in the first season of his HBO series The Rehearsal, in which Fielder confronted his longstanding fascinations with the inherent artifice behind human interactions and behaviour, breaking through the fourth wall only to invite the audience to watch him reconstruct it—and then dared us to see how thoroughly we could pinpoint, in the aftermath, what was real and what was theater. Only the Real Fielder Heads (those of us with taste) could truly find it funny but everyone who watched found it compelling—all the way up to a finale that pulled the rug out, tying together grander themes of identity and soul-searching that had been in play the whole time underneath the surface of Fielder’s play-acting schemes.