(This post repurposes some insights from a work-in-progress piece on Nathan Fielder that has been laying dormant in my Google Drive for the past 8 months -- perhaps this will provide a jumpstart.)
When it comes to reality television, I am most frequently an ironic viewer of reality programs. If reality television is built on structures of voyeuristic cruelty, I am certainly a guilty party. Anna McCarthy's piece on the connections between neoliberal ideology and the rise of the reality television show struck me quite strongly, in part because I think it overlaps quite nicely with the one "reality" show that I took quite seriously recently: Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal (2022). Calling Fielder's exercise in self-abnegating comedy a reality show is somewhat reductive, but to its audience, that is how it is presenting its tropes and engaging the viewer. More importantly, Fielder is concerned with a critique of where reality ends and cinematic construction begins; where the space between the two might become uneasy, tense, fraught with moral and personal dilemmas.
In her discussion of the show Random 1, an A&E program centered on random acts of philanthropy, McCarthy describes the kind of program that Fielder is parodying in many ways. Writing of the show's "roving RV support team, poised to get busy with the consummate cultural sign of neoliberal efficiency, the laptop/headset combination, embodies this ideal, mobilizing corporate voluntarism," McCarthy situates reality TV's enactment of "the makeover as a kind of social reform" (25). Fielder's program is not quite a makeover show -- though one could attribute such a foundation to Nathan for You, his Comedy Central series predicating on assisting and making over small businesses -- but it similarly addresses a particular configuration of neoliberal (in)efficiency. In the first episode of the series, the writer/director/comedian helps a slightly awkward and anxious man named Kor to confess a lie to his trivia team partner. Kor's dilemma -- that he has been lying to his trivia team about having an MA for a decade -- sets the stage for Fielder's grand project, which coincides with McCarthy's assessment of reality TV's neoliberal impulses. Fielder's show professes the belief that through elaborately constructed recreations and rehearsals for difficult conversations and life-changing choices, we can plan for every potential permutation and combination of what might happen. Why leave things up to chance when there is, in fact, another way to live our lives, one that might reduce or downright eliminate variability? This is Fielder's suggestion: though it addresses anxiety, it also perpetuates a very neoliberal mindset -- the idea that rehearsal, preparation, and rigorous control are the best ways to approach success. Though this does not quite cohere with the ideas of "chance" and "randomness" analyzed by McCarthy (33), it structures power in a similar way -- Fielder's status as "the state parent" is simply more visible than "absent" (36).
When he first approaches Kor, Fielder reveals that he had been rehearsing and planning this conversation for several days with an actor playing Kor; Fielder’s team had previously scoped out Kor’s home, creating an unbelievably precise replica for Fielder to run through his scenario prep. Like most of the ordinary folks that Fielder ushers into his universe, Kor seems both amazed and alienated by the process, by the lengths that the comedian will go to in pursuit of perfectly calibrated and rehearsed perfection. Describing Fielder’s method as “surreal,” he draws an allusion midway through the first episode to Roald Dahl’s Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory – situating Fielder as “dream-maker” Wonka and himself and the other test subjects as the Charlie Buckets of the equation. When Fielder asks if Wonka was a bad guy, Kor answers: “Well, he had some questionable things,” highlighted by the fact that children were harmed, and possibly even killed, in Wonka’s factory.
Of course, Wonka highlights a kind of neoliberal fantasy in and of itself, the desire to be plucked from obscurity and given the keys to a vast corporate fortune. Wonka's act -- his bequeathing of the chocolate factory to Charlie Bucket -- is a "social reform" in Dahl's universe, to borrow McCarthy's phrasing. Where The Rehearsal becomes vastly more interesting is in its aggressive and uncompromising critique of Fielder's own cruel gaze. The irony becomes metacinematic and intensely complicated: Fielder becomes cognizant of his own television program's propensity to put others on display for a merciless audience, ready to pounce on any individual who exists outside the norm. If McCarthy ponders, in relation to Random 1, "who has benefitted from this process, other than the helpers?" (32), Fielder turns such an inquiry into a foundational part of his show, right down to the very last episode. Fielder associates himself with the god-like position of Wonka -- the dream-maker, the nightmare-maker, the godhead of a universe entirely in his control -- and fosters a sense of self-awareness about this kind of philanthropic effort. Naturally, the show progresses to feature Fielder as a major part of the action, turning his critique of reality television further into a critique of the self, an annihilation of his own tendencies. I wonder, then, if Fielder's deconstruction of the very structures of reality television represents a new frontier within the confines that McCarthy establishes -- or whether it is merely the kind of solipsistic navel-gazing that his critics accused him of perpetuating last summer, when the show was met with both adoring praise and fierce criticism.
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