I cannot tell you what The Rehearsal is. You have to see it for yourself.
Well, I can tell you. It's a show about a man (Nathan "For You" Fielder) who has been given an HBO budget to help real people practice everyday situations, down to every tiny detail and every conceivable outcome. Imagine the scenes on Queer Eye where the coiffed and coached hero bares his soul to his long-suffering ex, but planned out as meticulously as a casino heist by a straight man whose primary expertise is plumbing the depths of the human capacity for awkwardness.
But you still have to see it for yourself. It is an exquisitely unhinged twist on "social experiment" TV, ass-puckeringly uncomfortable one moment and tender and raw in the next. Fielder's previous show, Nathan For You, also featured him "helping" real people with their problems via wildly convoluted business plans, stunts, and subterfuges, but The Rehearsal's laser-focused, intensely personal take on that premise makes Dumb Starbucks look like a kid's lemonade stand.
In the premiere episode, Fielder's first "client" is Kor, a teacher and bar trivia enthusiast who is dreading telling his longtime friend Tricia about a relatively insignificant lie he told her years earlier that's begun to eat at him. Fielder gets to know Kor, cultivating a level of intimacy using a few wildly convoluted subterfuges, and then stages an exact replica of their regular trivia venue in a warehouse for Kor to rehearse the conversation with an actor playing Tricia.
The real Tricia is talkative, highly strung enough to call the cops on a food truck outside her apartment, and (spoiler) a kind and empathetic friend. We learn this last part in the scene where Kor eventually has the actual conversation with her in the real bar, where his fears about her blowing up at him over his lie don't come to pass. But we first meet her in a covertly filmed scene where the actor hired to play her for rehearsal purposes pretends to be a birdwatcher Tricia is interviewing for her blog about thrifty things to do in NYC. This is so the actor, Gigi Burgdorf, can observe Tricia in order to become her in rehearsal.
As an improv and characterization exercise, it's hard to imagine a more compelling challenge for an actor, and Burgdorf nails it. She bustles into the fake bar in a faintly absurd black beanie identical to the one Tricia wore to their "birdwatcher" interview and launches into a litany of complaints, the sunny openness she shows earlier in the episode now buried under a pinched expression and aggrieved demeanor. As she builds on Kor's suggestion that she'd come in bitching about her roommates, she captures the firehose intensity of Real Tricia's stream-of-consciousness chatter; when Fielder and Kor are rehearsing the "Tricia blows up and storms out" outcome, Burgdorf escalates the overreaction with raw precision that makes you feel her genuine hurt.
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Provided we more or less buy the experiment as presented, Burgdorf met with this woman for half an hour and, while improvising a cover story that required a passable amount of detailed knowledge about a specific hobby, picked up enough of her mannerisms and preoccupations to not only be an effective scene partner for Tricia's longtime friend to rehearse with, but also to correctly extrapolate his prediction about her behavior on the actual night in at least one take.
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But a mere impersonation wouldn't do here. This isn't only for Kor's benefit, or Fielder's — it is a comedy television show, and Burgdorf makes Fake Tricia the capital-C Character she clearly seems to be IRL by pushing it just a touch far enough into cringe. She's a motormouthed Eeyore with a persecution complex; it's a deeply funny performance, and an instantly recognizable archetype to anyone who's ever worked on the other side of a bar or counter or cubicle wall with a well-meaning Negative Nelly. (For the record, Burgdorf told one of her many new fans on Twitter that she was "so glad the real Tricia was a lot nicer than [her] version".)
But is The Rehearsal real?
The burning ethical and existential questions raised as you watch the show are very real. How might framing her as a potential antagonist affect the real Tricia and Kor's friendship? How do we reconcile the obvious violation of dissecting real people's personalities and mannerisms without their prior permission and knowledge for the purpose of "removing uncertainty" in nerve-wracking situations, not to mention filming both them and those detailed dissections for an internationally distributed TV show? How much do the rehearsers know about what they, and their oblivious friends, are signing up for?
Real Tricia posted on her (real) blog this week that she and Kor are still friends and trivia teammates, that she thought he was "brave" for coming clean, and that's about all she'd say given the undoubtedly ironclad HBO non-disclosure agreements involved. And according to an Instagram post spotted by Vulture's Rebecca Alter, the company that runs the Alligator Lounge's Monday trivia night called the "real" trivia night in the episode "a reasonable facsimile," adding in parentheses "reality TV ain't real, folks."
So, as you watch through whatever happens in the remaining five episodes of this show, you can soothe some of your secondhand anxiety on behalf of the folks being roped in by remembering that there's certainly some TV magic involved in even the "real" scenes that follow all that rehearsing. Safe to say that if the premiere is any indication, Fielder's meticulousness pays off handsomely in the under-appreciated art of casting, as well as the more novel art of building fake bars in warehouses.
And yes: Get this woman her guest star Emmy.
The Rehearsal airs Fridays at 11 on HBO. The first episode is now streaming on HBO Max.
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