After watching the oddly unsettling finale of The Rehearsal, a natural question to ask would be “how did we get here exactly?” How did a comedian once known for pranking small business owners eventually end up examining the line between reality and fiction in such profound and thought-provoking ways? A good place to start would be by revisiting “Finding Frances,” the series finale to Nathan Fielder’s previous show Nathan for You, since it in many ways is the crucial link between these two shows.
Much of Nathan for You was built on the premise of Fielder helping small businesses succeed with ideas that were far too elaborate and ridiculous to ever be helpful. Though The Rehearsal does have a similar high-concept premise, with Fielder helping people rehearse important life moments in the hopes of preparing them for reality, its approach is much more sincere and rooted in exploring human nature through discomfort comedy. In “Finding Frances,” you can see Fielder discarding a lot of the (admittedly hilarious) fake reality show antics that defined the previous episodes of Nathan for You while embracing a more straightforward documentary style, in the process sowing the seeds of what would become The Rehearsal.
Instead of introducing one of Nathan’s plans to incorporate into a particular small business, the 87-minute finale begins with Fielder reflecting on Bill Heath, a 78-year-old actor who appeared in a Season 2 episode as a Bill Gates impersonator who wasn’t all that reminiscent of Bill Gates. As the series went on, Fielder would have further interactions with Bill, who would often talk about a woman from his past named Frances, who he was once in love with but unfortunately drifted apart from. Now with no wife or children, he often finds himself thinking about Frances and wondering what ever happened to her. Feeling a bit of a connection to Bill and the fact that he sacrificed a relationship in the name of moving to Hollywood to make it in show business as a young man, Fielder takes it upon himself to help Bill track down Frances.
Though the episode is done in a more naturalistic style, it does still have a few signature Nathan for You-style schemes embedded within the overall search. Because Bill hasn’t seen Frances in over 50 years, it forces Nathan to get creative in tracking down information about her. The first of these involves locating a high school yearbook by tricking the administration of Frances’s old high school into thinking that they’re scouting locations for the sequel to the 2012 Matthew McConaughey movie Mud, since much of it was filmed in her Arkansas hometown. They also stage a fake “57th High School Reunion” for Frances’s high school class, but because Bill went to a different high school, he has to attend in disguise as someone else who went to her school while convincing the attendees that they had already met him decades prior.
Yet as Fielder gets himself deeper into helping Bill reconnect with “the one that got away,” Nathan becomes much more skeptical about trusting Bill, due to his eccentricities and the revelation that he wasn’t a Bill Gates impersonator before appearing on Nathan for You. It shows a more in-depth approach to exploring these odd characters that Fielder encountered over the course of Nathan for You that doesn’t feel as much like he’s poking fun at them, even if there is this level of making us aware of the artifice that complicates everything, much like on The Rehearsal.
“Finding Frances” bears even more of a resemblance to this later show when Fielder starts to insert himself into the episode and its examinations of love by spending time with an escort who he originally hired to see how Bill acts around women. It makes for this dissecting of the line between someone pretending to feel a certain way and their actual feelings, which brings to mind the conversations about ethics that came up online as The Rehearsal has been airing, but can be countered by the fact that Fielder often makes himself the butt of the joke or lets the people who see him as being manipulative express it on camera. Meanwhile, it seems completely voluntary that the escort Maci, much like Angela in The Rehearsal, has agreed to appear on TV. However, there’s always the question of whether Fielder’s subjects ever get themselves remotely into what they signed up for, which gets even more complicated in regard to children, which The Rehearsal eventually attempts to wrestle with.
The connection between the Nathan for You finale and The Rehearsal as a whole is most obvious in a sequence where Bill rehearses how he would approach meeting Frances for the first time in decades with an actress playing her. It’s not hard to look at this as a trial run for The Rehearsal, as this later show would explore taking these pivotal, life-changing conversations or moments and rehearsing them beforehand so it can be anticipated how they will go. It’s a premise that has its roots even earlier on in Nathan for You’s run, as a recent Vulture article revealed that Fielder got the idea for The Rehearsal from the fact that when Nathan for You was preplanning the undertaking of its insane business ideas, the show’s crew would rehearse with actors to anticipate how real people would react, which often would not go as planned. There’s an added layer to this dynamic in “Finding Frances,” since Bill is an actor himself, so you can see his first few rehearsals are fairly over-dramatic and theatrical, while things become a little more muted and natural when Bill is forced to consider things from Frances’s perspective while sporting a questionable wig.
In The Rehearsal, there’s a much more meticulous approach to creating an artificial life that’s intended to feel real, as Fielder creates a completely functioning bar made to look exactly like the Brooklyn lounge where the subject of the first episode is hoping to divulge a long-held secret. Similarly, Fielder employs an overarching rehearsal that spans the rest of the season where Angela, a woman who is unsure about being a mom, gets to “rehearse” being a mother by raising a kid from age 0 to 18 by having different actors swapped in to play him at different stages. Much of the humor, discomfort, and emotional catharsis comes from the fact that Fielder eventually inserts himself into the experiment more and more, deciding to co-parent this fictional child while wrestling with some of his own personal issues. And much like Bill in “Finding Frances,” we come to see that Angela has her own set of… let’s just say quirks, which reveal themselves as Nathan and we the audience spend more time with her.
However, one big difference between “Finding Frances” and The Rehearsal is that in the latter show, the subject eventually bails before seeing through their final goal. This makes for a finale that forces Fielder to question where he went wrong, especially when it seems that one of the “fake sons” he’s fathered over the course of the show has actually confused his “pretend daddy” with being his real one. “Finding Frances,” however, arrives at a much cleaner conclusion, perhaps because it embraces the comfort of fiction instead of interrogating it. When Bill and Nathan finally do track down Frances, Nathan is hesitant about cornering her with the show’s cameras around, so Bill instead calls Frances while parked outside her house. They have a very sweet, pleasant conversation, but it also has an air of melancholy, since Bill and Frances both seem to realize that too much has changed since they dated in high school, and you simply can’t change the past. This leads Bill to instead go on a date with the actress who had played Frances in their rehearsals, while Nathan meets up for a date with Maci as we’re made uncomfortably aware of the cameras and the artifice of it all before one last drone shot takes us away to the episode’s ending credits.
It is a pretty perfect ending to a consistently surprising show, so much so that master documentarian Errol Morris praised the episode and the final scene in particular in a piece he wrote for The New Yorker. You have to imagine that a similarly perfect ending was something Fielder was chasing when he decided to further explore the possibilities of controlling the moment while making The Rehearsal. And though The Rehearsal in many ways shows the dark side of trying to construct a perfect version of reality, both are great examples of what can happen if someone with a camera crew just commits themselves to one long, very absurd premise rooted in reality, and sees where it takes them. While the imperfections of this approach are on display in The Rehearsal in sharp contrast to “Finding Frances,” the fact that Fielder’s latest show was just renewed for a second season leaves open the possibility that maybe he’ll arrive at something a little more perfect next time around.
Credit: Source link
