Nathan Fielder

In the first episode of The Rehearsal (2022), a man called Kor has something to tell a woman on his quiz team and has been putting it off. Nathan Fielder's crew rebuilds their bar inside a warehouse, down to the taps and the chalk on the trivia board, and lets Kor try the conversation until he has tried every version. Fielder produces a flowchart of every direction it might take. We laughed at it, and then we stopped laughing, because we had drawn something like it in our heads before phoning our own relatives. The joke is on somebody, and it takes a minute to notice it is on us.

He came up through Canadian television, on This Hour Has 22 Minutes between 2007 and 2009, with a consumer-advice parody, and the persona he built there has barely changed since: level, polite, faintly sorry about everything, and the sorrier it sounds the funnier it gets. Nathan for You (2013–17) put it to work helping small businesses in ways they had not asked for. The Rehearsal is the same persona given a warehouse, and it is the best thing he has made. He has co-created The Curse (2023) with Benny Safdie, playing Asher Siegel opposite Emma Stone, and co-directed a documentary about Elizabeth Holmes, You Can See Everything (2026), with Lance Oppenheim.

The method depends on the copies, and the copies depend on a crew. Marco Cordero shoots the replica bar exactly as he shoots the original, flat and even, so a cut from one to the other barely registers. Adam Locke-Norton and Andrew Fitzgerald edit so that we are sometimes a full scene into a rehearsal before we realise it is one. Schuyler Telleen and Rosie Sanders' production design goes down to the stools, and Briana Jorgenson keeps Fielder in the same zipped jacket throughout, as though he were a costume too. It is disturbing every time.

The caveat is one most critics waved through. Fielder's need to control every outcome becomes the story, and by the middle of the run the client he is rehearsing for is himself. For a stretch the joke is that nothing is happening, and on a sofa that plays as nothing happening. The volunteers thin out; those who remain are real people with real beliefs, and there are scenes where the show seems unsure whether it is listening to them or waiting for them to say something usable. Some critics find this manipulative; we think the discomfort is the point.

In 2013 he told a podcast: "It's weird that I have a TV show, because I hate being on camera." Every project since has found another reason to keep him there. The Holmes documentary is a departure, a feature and somebody else's story, and we would like to see what he does when the room is not his to rebuild.