The Rehearsal
While all the conversation around Max right now (please, just change it back to HBO at this point) is about season 2 of The Last of Us, especially after last night, a returning show is about to land on the service with a perfect 100% critic score, and one that is already “certified fresh,” the site’s highest honor.
That show would be Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal season 2, the absurdist comedy that last aired in 2022, and got a 95% score back then. Audiences were almost just as on board, with just a slightly lower 88% score there. The show ultimately had enough viewership to return for a second season. Here’s the synopsis:
“Nathan Fielder returns to television to explore the lengths one person will go to reduce the uncertainties of everyday life. Fielder stars as the director of rehearsals, which are elaborately staged scenarios re-creating parts of ordinary people’s lives that are meant to help them prepare for a big moment in their lives. A construction crew, a legion of actors and seemingly unlimited resources all come together to allow ordinary people to rehearse for these moments by giving them the opportunity to play them out in carefully crafted simulations of Fielder’s own design.”
Things have just spiraled from this original concept, with more basic problems for individuals now going all the way to building fake airplanes to test pilots and a whole bunch of other things that are hard to even grasp in season 2’s trailer, which you can see below:
It is hard to explain just how weird this show is, but if you are at all familiar with Fielder’s work, whether that’s Nathan For You or The Curse, then yeah, this probably makes sense. But even then, this is all just above and beyond what he’s done in the past, and thankfully Max is essentially letting him do whatever he wants with this increasingly bizarre series.
It just came out. The Rehearsal season 2 will air on Sundays, alongside The Last of Us, so we have some time to brace ourselves for what’s coming the rest of the season. But even then, I doubt most of us are going to be ready for the places this is about to go. We’ll find out soon enough.
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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
