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After the incredible first episode, I was kind of disappointed by this one. There was very little of the “here is a ludicrously convoluted and unworkable plan Nathan has come up with” and instead it was almost entirely “take a look at these two weirdos”. And of course, those two were super weirdos so it was still very entertaining, but still disappointing. I guess it makes sense as the first part of an arc that will carry over the season, but it means the whole episode is setup.
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Jul 24, 2022 13:47
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 05:27 |
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inferis posted:He moved an entire fake bar coast to coast just to have a place to hang out. To get around labor laws he got a robot baby to recreate the screams of an actual live baby from a livestream. The fake bar is just a joke about the fact that it was so expensive to build for the pilot that they had to contrive reasons for it to appear in more episodes. The baby plan is funny of course, but there were no more layers to it. I’m sure that by the end of the season the plan will turn out hilarious, but as I said this episode is all setup. By the way, I hate to resurrect Nathan Fakery chat (as the answer is that it doesn’t matter what is real or not as it’s funny), but I’m fairly sure everything in the barn is scripted and recorded later to stitch all the rest of the footage into a narrative.
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Jul 24, 2022 14:25
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HBO is not going to stump up the cash to move an entire set to Oregon just to ease the melancholy of a single oddball. TV shows often bend plots to justify reusing sets that were expensive to build. Just off the top of my head, the beginning of Star Trek: Discovery is largely set on the bridge of a starship that blows up at the end of the two-part pilot. The rest of the first season then contrives to have the set reappear, through flashbacks, visiting the destroyed ship floating in space, an alternate universe where it didn’t blow up, etc. This is just one example, it happens all the time in shows of all quality levels. Interviews about The Rehearsal mention that it was a particularly expensive pilot. And there’s no way they would be allowed to build this elaborate bar set for just a one-off episode. The fact that Nathan provided an amusingly flimsy excuse for such an extravagance was putting a hat on the realities of TV production. It was part of the joke. As for the barn, those same interviews I mentioned say that Nathan is a master of forming a story out of reams of perhaps disparate footage. And in this show that is the structural function of the barn scenes - to provide framing and context to the events in the house. This would all be easier to do after the “reality” portion of the show was wrapped, so I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be “faked”. They film all the reality bits, look through the footage and decide what the story they want to tell with it is, and then film the barn sections to tie it all together. This is not a criticism! The Rehearsal and Nathan For You are not reality shows, or documentaries. They are fictional comedies that rely on the authentic reactions of “real” people. Because of that reliance, a lot of the hilarious things they do have to be done for real. But anything that does not rely on those reactions is probably faked, because if it looks the same on camera, why wouldn’t it be? This is all cool and good. The Rehearsal and NFY are both TV shows that are above all about TV. They’re about the odd character of “Nathan Fielder,” a weird, awkward guy who somehow was able to command the resources of a TV production company and uses them to play out his bizarre obsessions and also for his own personal enrichment, using them to help him try to overcome his anxiety, make friends, find a girlfriend, and in this most recent episode indulge his paternal instincts. This is all justified with the patina of US reality TV presentation and tropes. Nathan does something selfish or pathetic but it’s justified with inspirational-sounding music and soft-focus as if some kind of emotional breakthrough was made. Considering the realities of how TV production really works when watching the show does not ruin the illusion, it allows you to appreciate it even more. Comrade Fakename fucked around with this message at 15:28 on Jul 24, 2022 |
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Jul 24, 2022 15:24
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precision posted:it's pointless to speculate about what HBO "would" do when they already have done it. they apparently trusted Nathan and gave him a big budget It’s not about what show costs more money or less, this is just how TV is made. Nathan pitches a TV pilot to HBO, which hopefully will turn into a full series. HBO agree but they hold onto the purse strings. They don’t just hand a cheque to Nathan and say “make whatever this money can fund,” they keep an eye on what their money is buying. When HBO decides to take the show to a full series, they are well aware that a big chunk of their cash went to building a recreation of the Alligator Bar. That’s expensive, so they likely wrote into the contract that the bar set had to be reused so they could feel like they got their money’s worth. This is a problem for an extremely episodic show like Nathan’s so they drop in a comedically contrived excuse to include it in the second episode, one that had nothing to do with the bar. This works because it’s a meta joke about the way TV is made in a show about how TV is made.
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Jul 24, 2022 16:15
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inferis posted:I bet they reused them just to save money I mean, they definitely did, all the time. I’ve not read the books, but I guarantee there are scenes taken from the books placed in different locations in the show because “can we move this scene to a set we already have available?” is a conversation that occurs in all television across all budget levels. No one wants to spend more money than they have to, even if it’s the most expensive TV show ever made, at the time.
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Jul 24, 2022 16:19
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emgeejay posted:But they would pay for a new warehouse and the costs of transporting it there so they... wouldn't feel like they wasted money on its construction? I'll grant that at some point in budgetary discussions, the bar appearing in multiple episodes probably did help justify spending more on building it. But the idea that re-using it was an HBO mandate rather than a creative decision doesn't give the writers enough credit. I'm not really sure what you're arguing against here. You agree HBO probably would want them to reuse the existing expensive set. The episode provides a comedically flimsy reason for Nathan hanging out in a now irrelevant set. Star Trek: Discovery is hardly the only case of warping the narrative to reuse sets. Again, just off the top of my head: In the later seasons of The 100 various plot contrivances appear to allow characters to revisit old locations despite being many light years and hundreds (thousands?) of years away. It's a little different, but in Angel, at the beginning of the second season, despite being a demon-fighting private eye, Angel incongruously decides to buy and renovate an art-deco LA hotel. This allowed many scenes to take place in the large, open, and most importantly easy to film in hotel lobby instead of Angel's cramped PI's office. In Masters of Sex, Masters and Johnson move into a new office for much the same reason, and the fact that they're operating a sex clinic (where privacy would be quite useful) in a large, open plan office with clear glass walls doesn't ever come up. We'll probably never know the exact intentions behind this, but it hardly seems a stretch to imagine a show all about how TV is made would make a meta joke about how TV is made. As for the barn - assuming that the whole baby swapping plan is actually performed for real (and personally I suspect that the timeline is a good bit shorter than the show implies but whatever), they are going to have reams and reams of footage and no idea until it is all over about what is funny or worthwhile. This episode was almost entirely about Angela's dating exploits - it's entirely possible from the beginning that none of that would have been entertaining and might never have even been mentioned on the show. But they hit gold with Robin and so it becomes a big deal. It would be much easier for them to stage conversations in the barn afterwards when they've worked out what the narrative will be later. Remember, in whatever actual control room they'd use to monitor these cameras, the conversations will be about what's funny, not what they have to do to make the experiment work. The barn we see is probably just a sound stage, there's no reason to spin up a location again. There is a lot that we see, of course, that Nathan does for "real". Angela appear to be a "real" person, as does Robin. For their reactions to be authentic, a lot of this has to be carried out authentically. But for everything else, why would they? "Nathan Fielder" is a character, the real version does not actually believe that an elaborate plan to swap children in and out of a house for a week or two is a good way to actually come to terms with becoming a parent. And it's fun to think about where the gaps between what's shown and how it worked lie. veni veni veni posted:Nothing about the logistics of faking moving the set makes sense. No one's suggesting they didn't move the set.
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Jul 25, 2022 13:50
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They really push the pathos of it, but I’m sure what happened with Remy is vary common for child actors his age. He was basically pretending someone else was his parent for a few hours a day for a while, which is what most acting jobs boil down to for a six-year-old. Until all the meta stuff (which is when Nathan was actually trying to fix the issue) it was probably a pretty unremarkable experience for Remy, as far as these things go. Anyway, incredible finale, incredible series, Nathan ascendant.
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Aug 21, 2022 13:06
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| # ¿ May 17, 2024 05:27 |
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I turned around on this show when I realised it was a sequel to Neon Genesis Evangelion set in an alternate future where Shinji and Asuka were middle-aged and had got married. Basically I want a cut of the finale where Komm, süsser Tod starts playing once the branch is cut. Seriously though, I wonder how much of this is autobiographical? One of the only things we know about Nathan is that he got divorced recently - I don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that Asher and Whitney’s relationship is an exaggerated version of Nathan and his ex-wife’s. Both Nathan and Asher produce and star in what, from a production standpoint, are both essentially reality TV shows. Maybe the anti-gravity is an interpretation of Nathan feeling like he was literally yeeted from the marriage.
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Jan 22, 2024 05:12
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