‘The Rehearsal’ Is a Litmus Test for Cruelty

Nathan Fielder’s HBO series blurs the line between helping people and making fun of them.

Nathan Fielder sitting at a bar in ‘The Rehearsal’
HBO

Before we talk about this topic this week, some housekeeping: Humans Being was mostly free since it started last December, but starting this week, most editions will be exclusive to subscribers of The Atlantic. Most of you are already Atlantic subscribers and can skip ahead to the fun stuff. But if you’re not already a subscriber, I hope you choose to become one. You’ll get the magazine and all of your favorite subscriber-only newsletters—a great deal that I think you’ll find is worth it. Just make sure you use this link when you subscribe so that they know you came from me. I have to carry my weight around here—I can’t let all these other great writers embarrass me.


When I was 15 years old, I was sent to a summer program called Magabooks. It was a “Literature Ministries” program that lasted about two months, organized by the Michigan conference of Seventh-day Adventists. I found out about Magabooks from my stepdad, who told me to pack my bags and leave that same day. I was to move to suburban Michigan to live in an apartment with about six other kids and sell Bibles and other Christian books door-to-door.

More than 20 years later, I still remember the sales pitch I had to memorize during the first weeks of training: “My name is Jordan and I’m a student working my way through school. Instead of junk food and trinkets, we decided to offer something more healthy. Here, take a look.” And then, after saying “take a look,” I extended a Seventh-day Adventist cookbook called Healthy Choices.

I was taught proper eye contact, word choice, speaking pace, and body language. The nitpicks were tedious, and I hated them at first; then I mastered them well enough to love them. I had daily drills to memorize my pitch. After that came objection training, where we would roleplay potential objections that I would need to counter until the hypothetical conversation ended in a sale (and a soul closer to Christ).

My training was an education in well-intentioned manipulation. I was trained to start with a secular-sounding cookbook as an accessible entryway to the Christian books in my bag, like Angels Among Us, Steps to Christ, and the Bible. I was taught to balance joviality with confidence. What I remember most, though, was learning why it was so important to physically extend the book toward each potential buyer.

I had to practice the motion repeatedly. I had to grab the book from the top so that the cover faced the right way for the stranger when I extended my arm. The placement needed to be just above their waist level, which is where a person’s hands go naturally when something is offered to them. If their hands didn’t move, I was taught to hold the pose, arm extended, smile maintained, until the awkward pressure broke them. And usually it did. When someone is placed in an uncomfortable situation, they tend to act impulsively to ease the tension. In this case, that meant taking a cookbook in their hands. If they tried to hand it back, I would resist, and they would be my prisoner.

I was very good at selling books.

Today, I hate just about everything about the experience I imposed so effectively on others. I hate when salespeople respond with the trained responses that I once memorized. I hate “clipboard people” fundraising outside of grocery stores for a good cause, and the math they use to make an ongoing donation sound cheaper than it is. (“If $22 a month is too expensive, what about just 0.75 a day?”) I hate being held captive in conversations at professional events where people speak in networking jargon and obfuscate their needs and intentions. Just tell me what you want and respect my answer, I want to say. Just don’t manipulate me.

I’m sensitive to feeling manipulated even when the tactic has a social purpose. One of my biggest pet peeves in conversations is when someone uses bait to share a story that they want to tell, and pauses until I take it:

“I had a crazy thing happen to me once,” they might say, followed by a pause. They might just want to feel validated in my interest, but all I feel is that they put the onus on me to invite a story that they want to share. They put Healthy Choices in front of me and are waiting until I give in. (See also: “Can I ask you a question?” That’s for you to decide. If I don’t know what the question is, you can’t defer to my judgment on whether it’s appropriate.)

Well-intentioned manipulation is at the core of The Rehearsal, a new series on HBO Max. The show is nearly impossible to explain, and you’ve likely never seen anything like it: The premise is that rehearsing difficult conversations can help you to achieve their best possible outcomes. But the show’s host, comedian Nathan Fielder, takes that concept to almost unimaginable extremes. He hires actors to practice roleplaying real-life dilemmas, replicates the settings where the conversations will be held, and attempts to prepare for each possible variable using flowcharts and decision matrices.

HBO

In the first episode, a teacher named Kor wants Fielder’s help with coming clean about a lie—Kor told his trivia club that he has a master’s degree, but he only has a bachelor’s. When Kor and Fielder meet, Fielder explains the premise of his show.

“Everything that’s happened so far today, I’ve rehearsed it dozens of times. These exact words, in a replica of your home, with an actor playing you,” Fielder explained. “Remember a couple of weeks ago when the gas company came by because of a leak in your building? Well, there wasn’t a leak in your building—that was my team. And when you gave them access, they secretly made a digital map of your entire home. We then re-created every detail of the space in a physical set in a warehouse a few miles from here, and with the help of a fake you, I could practice every single permutation of this interaction, and have a plan for it.”

Whether Fielder is actually interested in helping people or seeking comedy at their expense is disputed. There has been debate on whether this type of comedy is exploitative mockery, which The Atlantic’s Shirley Li called a willful misread of the show. “Fielder, after all, is the true butt of the joke,” she says, and his antics are ultimately about him learning the limits of controlling social interactions.

But it’s hard to ignore the fact that Fielder’s participants are often awkward or strange, say ridiculous things, and have abnormally low awareness of how they are perceived. At some points, I thought it was a wonder that some of them signed releases for their footage, until Fielder touched on this in a scene that underlined why I was taught to let Healthy Choices hover in front of potential buyers: People will make fast decisions to end social discomfort, whether that means taking a cookbook in someone else’s hands or signing a four-page contract.

Whether you watch The Rehearsal as a comedy or insightful social commentary on human interaction, it’s a must for anyone who can stomach the discomfort that comes from a deadpan comedian—think a much subtler, more insightful Borat—with an endless imagination and a large production budget. The Rehearsal’s shifting tone offers a rare choose-your-own-adventure approach to entertainment, making it a unique litmus test for your empathy or cruelty. If you watch The Rehearsal as a comedy, you’ll find plenty of pure weirdness from Fielder’s participants to laugh at. But you could also watch his efforts with a sincerity that might make you question your own level of comfort with manipulating others, or with being manipulated yourself.

Or you might just feel sorry for some of the unwitting people who were looking for help only to be sucked into a genuine exploration into the lengths and limitations of trying to control life. Well-intentioned manipulation is still manipulation, after all.

***

Thanks to everyone who responded to my last Humans Being, about Victoria’s Secret and its damage to our culture. My favorite response came from Kit. Her email probably wasn’t meant to be funny, but I just love a good rant:

“This company is trash. As a woman’s brand, they fail miserably … They don’t give a damn about women. F those guys. I don’t care what they’re doing now, they should simply donate their assets to womens’ shelters; they’re irredeemable.”

I read that whole thing in the voice Mickey uses when he calls Rocky a bum, and I couldn’t stop laughing.

Unrelated, if you read about me selling Christian books door-to-door and are interested in reading more about my weird childhood, I hope you check out my memoir, Piccolo Is Black: A Memoir of Race, Religion, and Pop Culture. It was called “very heavy” in my first negative review. I like to imagine someone laughing at all the jokes in the first few chapters and then going Oh no as the scene cuts to them staring out into the ocean at night.

Speaking of books, this week’s book giveaway is You Can Change Other People, by Peter Bregman and Howie Jacobson. It seems fitting to pair this one with The Rehearsal. Just send me an email telling me about a common type of manipulation that you hate, and I’ll send the book to a random person who hits my inbox. You can reach me at humansbeing@theatlantic.com, or find me on Twitter at @JordanMCalhoun.

Jordan Calhoun is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.