Nathan Fielder Is Pioneering A New Genre Of TV

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By Coren Feldman

Nathan Fielder made a big splash in his previous show, Nathan For You, where under the guise of helping small businesses he pulled off some insane feats. Among his achievements are creating a Starbucks parody store called Dumb Starbucks that made national news, assuming a man's identity and performing a public stunt raise money for charity and making people camp out on a mountain overnight while solving riddles in order to get a small rebate on a gas purchase.

Nathan is skilled at creating big ideas with bells and whistles but the truth is, the core of his talent lies in his interactions with people.

He's good with people.

Fielder's persona on his shows - whether it's real or an act isn't immediately evident - is very unassuming. He comes across as kind of a loser, a loner with no friends or charisma who awkwardly ambles around life trying to find genuine human connection. But in presenting that persona to the people in his shows, he allows them to let down their guard and act in ways very few people would dare to in front of cameras. In one episode of Nathan For You, for example, multiple people say they believe in the healing properties of drinking urine. In an episode of The Rehearsal a man admits that he drives high all the time.

Okay, so let's get to The Rehearsal. The premise of the show is, Nathan wants to rule out uncertainty from life by pre-enacting events before they occur. Each guest on the show wants to figure out how something in their future might play out, and to help them, Nathan will do whatever it takes to mimic the possible scenarios. 

In the first episode, a man wants to confess to his trivia team partner that he lied about having a masters degree a decade ago when they met. Nathan recreates the exact bar in which he plans to have the conversation on a soundstage, down to the positioning of the salt and pepper shakers, and hires an actress to play the part of the man's trivia partner.

In the second episode, a woman wants to know what it will be like to be a parent, so Nathan hires dozens of baby and child actors, switching them out stealthily in order to comply with child labor laws, to give her a sense of motherhood. 

But Nathan himself is pre-enacting all of his interactions. Before he meets his guests, he plays through the same scenarios, writing out dialogue flow charts and having conversations with actors. The result is a wonderfully stilted charade, something that, while completely insane, somehow manages to reveal real human moments, like Nathan For You before it. 

Nathan Fielder's genre of TV is hard to define. It's not scripted (in a conventional sense, anyway), but it doesn't quite fit the bill for reality TV either. Between his two shows and How To With John Wilson, an impossible to pin down but incredibly good series of found footage video essays combined with man-on-the-street interviews, Fielder is creating something entirely different the likes of which TV has never seen before. It's weird, it's cringe, it's funny, it's touching, it's fake, it's real - it's worth watching.

Coren is the founder of CorenTV. Not many people know this, but those glasses are actually super glued on. Sleeping is uncomfortable.