TV review: The Rehearsal lampoons reality TV and is surprisingly brilliant
The Rehearsal is on Sky Comedy and NOW
(Sky Comedy and NOW) is brilliant, it really is.
It’s been out a few weeks on Sky and I’ve heard things about it that usually give me the shivers.
It lampoons reality TV. It’s hard to know what’s really going on, but that’s ok. It’s funny, but not funny ha-ha.
Any one of these phrases sounds like someone writing a PhD on modern telly. None of them suggests I’m going to enjoy it.
But it was a treat, once I got over the fact it’s not Curb Your Enthusiasm.
It feels a bit like Larry David. The setup in the first episode is that we’re watching a reality TV show, where someone is forced to confront an awkward truth they have been avoiding. In this case, Brooklyn teacher Kor wants to tell his pub-quiz team-mate Tricia that he doesn’t in fact have a Masters degree, he just let her and the other team members think that to impress them. (Just to be clear, these are all fictional characters. I think.) The problem is that, according to Kor anyway, Tricia is a tricky customer with a short temper.
Enter Nathan Fielder, a comedian and the writer of The Rehearsal. He offers to help Kor to break the news to Tricia, by meticulously rehearsing a meeting with her at a pub-quiz night, covering all the eventualities so he can make his confession without breaking his friendship with Tricia.
So far so , or even . The characters have that recognisable blend of sunny American sincerity and social awkwardness. But goes deeper.
We see Fielder rehearsing with an actor so he is ready for his first meeting with Kor (who responded to an ad asking ‘Are you avoiding something’). We then see the real Kor rehearsing with a stand-in for Tricia, in a replica of the pub where they will meet for the big reveal. It’s incredibly contrived, but then so was Seinfeld, and that didn’t stop it being nerve-rackingly funny.
There are real laugh-out-loud moments here. I’m still sniggering at the pretend cop saying he curses the Chinese for ever inventing gun powder — I don’t have time to go into the context, you have to be there.
The writing is sublime. Slow, almost too slow at the start, and then fast towards the end of the first episode as Kor meets Tricia for real and she’s actually lovely about his little white lie. This is where it deviates from Larry David and the ‘no hugging, no learning’ rule that made Seinfeld so viciously effective.
Kor leaves our screens, a bit pissed off that he’d been unwillingly fed the answers to the pub quiz, which he thought he won on his own merits. (I’d give Kor a show of his own, he’s a great character.) And we’re left looking at Nathan and his creepy rehearsal studio by the river. Why did he do it? Is he the one who needs help. Or maybe us for getting hooked on reality TV.
