The Rehearsal

Known best for his namesake show Nathan For You, Fielder moves to HBO for a brief but bizarre and brilliant comedy docuseries.

Baudrillard's ideas about simulation have a lot in common with the aforementioned Borges and Carroll stories, but updates it to the modern era (there's a reason his book appears and is quoted in The Matrix, and Fielder's new series The Rehearsal puts a comic spin on Baudrillard's prescient philosophy of the simulacrum. He brings his odd vision to the masses and invites participation with the spectacles he creates, but is often portrayed as sad and riddled with anxiety himself. The Rehearsal airs Friday nights at 11pm EST on HBO, and is available to stream on HBO Max. The Rehearsal (and Fielder's life, really) is trapped in this simulacrum, but throws one hell of a party in its own prison. In a way, it's almost as of the great Charlie Kaufman movie Synecdoche; New York has been remade as a comedy documentary, and yes, it's as unconventional as that sounds. They share an affinity for the unpolished, bumbling eccentricities of actual humanity, something also seen in the funny and sincere Joe Pera Talks With You. Before contacting Skeet, Fielder hired an actor to play him, and the two rehearsed various situations in the fully reconstructed apartment. ), and Fielder gets in touch several weeks later, hoping to help him deal with the small lie. The idea of a simulation becoming just as real as what it simulates has fascinated people for a while, especially as technology increases at exponential rates and the concepts of sentient artificial intelligence and simulation theory become increasingly popular. He has an upcoming series with Emma Stone and the Safdie brothers called The Curse on Showtime, but before that hits, HBO has his weird and staggeringly distinct series The Rehearsal. We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!" On Exactitude in Science, an old Jorge Luis Borges story, described a map of an Empire that became so meticulously real that its cartographers essentially replicated the very Empire they were mapping.