anyone else watching Nathan Fielder's "The Rehearsal" season 2?

S02E03 is incredible

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YES. what an experience. so far my favorite part is the ::: spoiler spoiler canadian idol episode. The paramount nazi bit was so fucking funny, and seeing Nathan deliver that No at the end was the perfect ending :::
And I recently started playing FlightGear (open source flight sim). So it's really adding to the current obsession
- That episode was so wild. I was trying to explain it to my wife and she was like, "so he lied to these people to get them to audition?" At first I was about to agree, but like, he didn't lie? His only promise was that the winner would get to perform a public domain song on national television on an exact recreation of the Houston airport. And, like, he can deliver that quite easily at this point. He just created an entire reality TV show for a bit on a single episode.
  
  The whole bit about how he is lying and manipulating people is best explored in the Rehearsal's first season. The subtext is that people put on a thin performance on stage, and the situations he is "voluntarily" placing them in are very questionable when you consider the coercive power of a camera crew. There's an inherent mismatch between reality and reality TV. So how is any reality TV ethical? The more real it gets, the more exploitative! You can't capture real emotion and real stakes, especially when it involves children or people in trouble, without seriously compromising ethics.
  Maybe the whole point is encapsulated in the interaction in that episode where he is talking with the two ladies, and they ask if there is a prize and he basically just tells them point blank that the whole thing is a sham but they still go along with it. It's because people have to go along with it, you have a camera pointed at their face and you already made them jump through a bunch of hoops to get to that point.
  
  I enjoy it when the subjects/actors have the ability to be in on the bit. The kid in s1 was pretty fucked up. That kid genuinely believed Nathan had become his new dad. I felt so bad for him.

43 comments