In the Flesh: The Rehearsal Season 1 (Patreon)

“But when we were playing daddy and Adam, we were just playing pretend, right?” subject and creator Nathan Fielder asks six-year-old Remy, one of a rotating cast of little boys who had played his son in the titular rehearsal which is the program’s ostensible reason for being. There’s real anxiety in Fielder’s eyes, and he chokes up several times during his repeated attempts to visit with Remy and explain the nature of the fiction they inhabited together. “I don’t want you to be just Nathan,” Remy, being raised by a single mother, tells him more than once. “I want you to be my daddy.” What to make of this inalterable emotional reality in the midst of so much high-concept artifice? If fiction is the tool Fielder employs to navigate relationships and daily life, what does he do when confronted by a child’s elemental inability to separate that same elaborate fiction from the reality it’s meant to dissect and clarify? By turning it back into fiction, naturally.

Again and again Fielder runs through the events that led to his having formed a bond with Remy, first with an older child actor taking Remy’s place, then with an adult, and finally with a mannequin. Of course what we see of this process is as edited and narrativized as any documentary, assembled after the fact and linked by Fielder’s thoughtful, introspective voiceover narration about his difficulty understanding emotions. Each fiction the show explores is contained within a greater and more structured fiction, that of the docu-series itself, which is in turn suspended in the uncertain medium of Fielder’s artistic intent and level of self-awareness. It’s what makes the emergence of Remy’s love for Fielder so powerful, not just in its rawness but in the sight of a small child turning Fielder’s own elaborate mechanism against him, entrapping the documentarian in a fiction he can’t solve through analysis or obfuscate by replicating or reiterating it. Instead, what emerges from Fielder’s attempts to recapitulate his bond with Remy seems to be the real thing, a genuine emotional breakthrough about fatherhood and human connection.

For all its elaborate gags and the cringe comedy of the painfully awkward moments it captures in the lives of oblivious, bigoted, and otherwise contemptible people, The Rehearsal never comes off as arrogant. When people like series lead Angela come off as unhinged and narcissistic, it’s not through tricks of pacing and editing but because giving people like that space to talk provides enough rope for them to hang themselves. It’s Fielder’s humility and humanity throughout the series which ultimately sell his genuine investment in that final moment as, playing the mother of a real child who himself played his fake child, he comes to the conclusion that the show wasn’t worth it, that the pain and confusion it caused Remy held more weight than whatever insights into parenting his comically elaborate simulation could deliver. Seldom has television felt so much like a miracle, however small and strange.