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Nathan Fielder’s ‘The Rehearsal’ is set to return for a second season

The show was a critical darling when it first premiered.

Nathan Fielder in The Rehearsal.
The Rehearsal HBO

In its first season, few shows on TV were more profound and unsettling than The Rehearsal. Now, Variety is reporting that the show is coming back for another season. In a new teaser, we see Nathan Fielder, the show’s creator and star, supervising the construction of five identical sets.

According to a description of the second season, “the urgency of Fielder’s project grows as he decides to put his resources toward an issue that affects us all.” That’s delightfully vague, but we wouldn’t expect anything else from a Fielder project.

The Rehearsal Season 2 | Official Teaser | HBO

In its first season, Fielder’s show was premised on the idea that people should be able to rehearse for situations in their lives so that they could be sure they’d get them right. From there, though, the show quickly spiraled into a rehearsal of an entire life, as well as something of a meditation on the nature of performance. Like most of Fielder’s recent work, the show refused to be any one thing.

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The show was hugely acclaimed, in part because of the strange turns it was willing to take, and because it seemed to delve so deeply into its creator’s mind. Other than The Rehearsal, Fielder is best known for shows like The Curse and Nathan For You, which are both premised on similarly absurd scenarios. Fielder’s work definitely isn’t for everyone, but for those who watched the first season, the second is likely to be just as madcap, intense, and funny. We have no idea what to expect, and that’s part of what makes it so exciting.

The Rehearsal will return to Max on April 20.

Joe Allen
Joe Allen is a freelance culture writer based in upstate New York. His work has been published in The Washington Post, The…
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