HBO’s Most Unconventional Series Is Officially Surging on Streaming

Nathan Fielder is a genius, and that’s no debate. He is one of the few creatives whose work has consistently received rave reviews thanks to his dedication to the craft. Part comedic and part dramatic, Fielder has found a way to take serious topics and infuse them with humor while doing serious reporting. It means something when his lowest-rated project on Rotten Tomatoes has a 68% score. However, one of his best shows is an HBO dramedy that is seeing a resurgence on streaming.

This show features Fielder’s signature absurd humor, meant to lighten serious topics. Two seasons have aired so far, and neither has a score below 95%. Titled The Rehearsal, the show takes normal situations and tries to remove the pressure by rehearsing them. So, whether it’s a job interview, a wedding, or even a date, the rehearsal is meant to remove the guesswork and make the event feel familiar, even if it’s quite new. The show goes to great lengths to recreate situations to make them feel as real as possible. It hasn’t been without its controversies, sometimes landing Fielder in hot water with the public or even companies like Paramount and the FAA.

Still, some of these qualities — like fake singing competition participants not knowing it’s a show or satirizing Paramount by comparing it to the Nazi regime — are what make The Rehearsal feel fresh and entertaining. The series has seen serious streaming gains over the last two weeks, with FlixPatrol consistently ranking it in the top ten. This surge coincides with the release of Fielder’s latest project, which has been receiving rave reviews from critics and fans.

A great detective is really just a personality with a method attached,
which is why we keep remaking the same four of them. Here is yours, what it says about you, and the
case for them being the best in the business.

You let people think you are not a threat and then you simply
never go away. Columbo is the only major detective show that tells you who did it in the
first ten minutes, because the pleasure was never the puzzle, it was watching a rich man
slowly realise he is in trouble.

• You are underestimated constantly, and you have stopped minding because it keeps
  working.
• The show invented the inverted detective format for television and nobody has bettered
  it since.
• Peter Falk won four Emmys for the part and played him across five decades.
• Your flaw is that one more question is rarely one more question.

You are the most interesting person in the room and you know
exactly how to use it. Rian Johnson built Blanc as a gentleman detective who is also an
outsider everywhere he goes, which lets him be charming at people who would never otherwise
talk to him.

• You read a room in seconds and you are not above performing a little to speed things up.
• Rian Johnson was nominated for the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Knives Out in
  2020.
• Wake Up Dead Man arrived on Netflix in December, making three Blanc films in six years.
• Your risk is enjoying the performance so much that people stop taking the point
  seriously.

Everybody tells you everything, and you have never once asked
them to. Jessica Fletcher is a crime novelist from a small town in Maine who is so warm and
so obviously trustworthy that suspects confess to her essentially as a social courtesy.

• You are the person friends call first, and you have a frankly alarming amount of
  information about everybody.
• Angela Lansbury was nominated for the Emmy twelve times for this role and never won
  once.
• The show ran twelve seasons, and Jamie Lee Curtis is now bringing the character back.
• Your flaw is that being told everything is only a gift if you know what to do with it.

You expect to be lied to and you are almost never disappointed.
Chandler wrote Marlowe as a man with a rigid private code in a city that has none, which is
why he takes the case, solves it, gets nothing out of it and takes the next one.

• You are the most cynical person your friends know and the one they would call at four in
  the morning.
• Bogart played him in The Big Sleep in 1946 and the plot is famously impossible to
  follow, which matters not at all.
• Elliott Gould, Robert Mitchum and Liam Neeson have all taken the part, and every version
  says something about its decade.
• Your weakness is a code so strict that it mostly punishes the person holding it.

‘The Rehearsal’s Nathan Fielder Lands Another Smash Hit

At her peak, Elizabeth Holmes was a success like no other. She founded Theranos, a blood-testing startup that made her a billionaire, but her downfall was swift when it was revealed she deceived investors. She was sentenced to 11 years in prison, which was reduced to 10. She has been the subject of numerous projects, including Hulu’s The Dropout and HBO’s The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley.

34 days before going to prison, Holmes invites a skeptical film crew to her home. That crew is Fielder’s, and what emerges is a 3-hour masterpiece titled You Can See Everything with a 96% score from critics and viewers on Rotten Tomatoes. The A24 documentary has succeeded by most metrics, including a $65 million box office haul against a $7 million production budget. Reports say A24 is considering submitting the movie for a Best Picture nomination.

Stream The Rehearsal on HBO Max in the U.S. and stay tuned to Collider for more updates.

The Rehearsal