The Rehearsal Recap: 50 First Dates

One of the sinister tricks of documentaries — to say nothing of their mutant cousin, the reality show — is how easily they make us forget about their essential artifice and invest in humans who we accept as living normally, even though what they’re doing is taking place in front of a camera. That doesn’t mean that truth isn’t possible to achieve, but part of Nathan Fielder’s genius is how compulsively he toys with the unreality of the reality he’s staging. This season, he’s poured HBO money into, say, a meticulous full-scale studio replica of a Houston airport terminal or a San Jose apartment circa 2011, but the interactions within those environments, often by actors trained in “the Fielder method,” are conspicuously stilted and weird. Yet he knows, despite all this nonsense, that we’ll buy into subplots like a shy co-pilot named Colin trying to make a love connection with an actress whose interest in him may itself be a performance.

Tonight’s episode of The Rehearsal doesn’t go as far out on a limb as the last one, which is no great slight against it, because the Redwood Forest doesn’t have limbs long enough to accommodate a diapered-up Fielder acting as baby “Sully” Sullenberger, guzzling mother’s milk from a giant puppet teat. But he keeps adding fascinating new layers of scare-quote “reality,” placing himself in the middle like a scientist still considering the results of an experiment, even though he keeps setting the lab on fire. It’s not even as if his basic premise about airline safety is misguided or that his insights into performance are not genuinely profound at times. He just takes the hilarious comic posture of the deadpan ringmaster of his own surreal circus.

The episode doesn’t get any funnier than the opening, which pays off Fielder’s obligations to the contestants of Wings of Voice, the Canadian Idol clone he’d created entirely as a means to prompt his co-pilot judges to tell people news they didn’t want to hear. In the second episode, he had promised singers at the audition that they’d appear on national television, not in a singing show, but “a singing competition as part of another TV show that has nothing to do with singing.” And so, with the fog machine running in his Houston airport set, the 50 remaining hopefuls perform a group medley of the public-domain hymn “Amazing Grace” through various genres like country, pop punk, techno, and, my favorite, hip-hop. (“Yo, grace is amazing, sounds so sweet I can taste it.”) Meanwhile, Fielder stands pensively in the shadows, still laser-focused on improving cockpit communication and saving lives in the process. HBO wants his show to be funny, though, so he pretends like he’s reluctantly coughing up the funniest thing you’ll see on TV this week.

One pattern he’s been focusing on lately is the isolation, loneliness, and stress of the pilots he’s brought into his experiment. The idea that pilots could risk their flying licenses by seeking a therapist seems so absurd that he cast actors as fake crew members to engage with his pilot-judges between takes. (“I just want to be clear in case the FAA is watching: This is in no way therapy. This is just two people talking.”) That leads him to Colin, an affable if ungainly pilot for an air cargo company, whom he approaches with the line, “I couldn’t help but overhear you talking to our boom operator,” as if it weren’t the least organic interaction imaginable. With Colin as his test case, Fielder embarks on an episode-long journey to get him a girlfriend — or some weird approximation of a girlfriend, anyway — to build the sort of personal relationship pilots need to communicate more effectively in the cockpit. Or something to that effect.

Because Colin has such low confidence, Fielder first comes up with the idea of the human version of a “pack,” which in the wild “gives each individual animal the confidence to do things they wouldn’t normally do on their own.” Nothing much comes of Colin’s pack in terms of actual insight — the act of hunting is not the same as the act of a successful coffee date, even in rehearsal form — but it does offer the absurdity of a dozen or so actors dressed exactly like Colin and echoing his awkward speech patterns and half-laughs. And it also leads to the next step, which is finding him someone to love.

Enter Emma, a.k.a. “Jennifer Kissme,” the most promising of a handful of actresses who purport to be into Colin, for whatever camera-ready nonsense Fielder has in store for them. (Another candidate is stuck on the idea of Colin as a sexy Albert Einstein type, claiming to have once been “wet and awake” while reading an Einstein biography.) Emma and Colin strike up a conversation about various travel destinations and go on an off-camera date that ends cordially, if not with any show of physical affection. To break through that barrier, the episode ramps up the absurdity yet again: Training five actors apiece to study Colin and Emma and get a sense of where they are in their relationship, Fielder then has them pair off and interact on five separate staged replicas of Colin’s studio apartment. This way, Colin can see various examples of how his romance with Emma might evolve.

It’s here that “Kissme” hits on its biggest idea, which is the freedom that actors have when playing a role. Where the real Colin and Emma have trouble getting much further than a clumsy hug after a putt-putt date, some of the acting couples have increased their intimacy levels with breathtaking speed. He’s particularly intrigued by an actress who has a real-life boyfriend, but can get into a character enough to feel something like love in a fictional scenario. Reflecting on his own experience acting opposite Emma Stone in The Curse, Fielder muses, “I didn’t understand how an actor could feel love in a completely fake relationship.” Maybe he’s just not a good actor. Or maybe approaching a situation like an actor will allow you to play the part.

And so we get a scene where poor Colin and Emma are cast as Captain Powers and Jennifer Kissme, given the simple stage direction that Captain Powers “has no problem asking for a kiss and doing it” and that Jennifer Kissme will live up to her surname. Though getting to that kiss is an excruciating ordeal, with small talk over exotic drums and Portuguese red wine, a peck on the cheek happens, and the two get what they privately tell Fielder they wanted. His conclusion is that “maybe we all need an excuse to be our true selves, and we’re just looking for permission.” How much Colin and Emma’s triumphant performance can be a model for how co-pilots can speak frankly to their captains is an open question. But if The Rehearsal is also just a show about human relationships and how we can better communicate, perhaps he’s onto something.

Scene Work

• Perhaps the future will offer a haptic pulse to suggest the flop sweat coming off Colin’s unanswered text to a woman about travel tips for Greenland and Iceland.

• An actress shoots her shot with Colin: “You know you remind me of Einstein. You have a certain reserved sexuality about you.”

• No one does crawl-under-your-chair cringe comedy like Nathan Fielder. The scene where he considers “the eye” as a signal a woman sends to get kissed is deliciously brutal to watch.

• Speaking of awkward, how about Fielder inviting the actresses’ boyfriends to watch them smooching their screen partners? (“She’s pretty talented, huh?” “Yeah, look at her go.”)