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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
40
Mixed:
4
Negative:
1
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Critic Reviews
Screen RantAug 28, 2025
The TelegraphMay 27, 2025
Season 2 Review:
What makes this series an improvement on the first is that it is consistently and deliberately laugh-out-loud funny. As with the first, it is incredibly moving. But Fielder peppers it with far more gags and knowing winks to the audience, which helps to make his moments of insight all the more powerful.
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Apr 21, 2025
Season 2 Review:
How do you re-create the disorienting high of seeing something you’ve never seen before a second time? The answer provided by The Rehearsal’s second season, which premieres on HBO on Sunday night, is: You don’t. That’s not to say its six episodes aren’t full of outlandish surprises and sudden turns
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Apr 17, 2025
Season 2 Review:
What results is both sidesplitting and one of the most stressful television watching experiences in recent memory. .... His typically deadpan persona takes on new weight here. “The Rehearsal” remains one of the best comedies out there, but what’s at stake is no joke.
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RogerEbert.comApr 15, 2025
Season 2 Review:
The show’s elegant writing lets him walk that delicate tightrope between lampooning his own self-importance and forging a more complete understanding of himself by forensically studying the people around him. .... Dissonance is what keeps “The Rehearsal” flying high as one of the funniest, most insightful shows on television.
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Jul 19, 2022
Season 1 Review:
It is meant to disorient the viewer, and it works. ... Most important, it feels true. It is true enough that as the rehearsals play out, as more and more twists and M.C. Escher–esque turns are introduced into the rehearsal process, your body registers them as true and responds accordingly. You cannot help but want to cringe because it’s so byzantine and so simultaneously emotionally naked. Like it or not, that sensation of bodily distress is the feeling of Fielder’s rehearsals succeeding.
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Jul 13, 2022
Season 1 Review:
One that is more audacious and thoughtful, and at times funnier, than Nathan For You. ... The Rehearsal will create many feelings inside anyone watching it, starting with vast amusement and perhaps ranging all the way to tears, even at the fakest parts. This is a great one.
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Jul 12, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The result is a defiantly unpredictable mix of cringe and pathos that delivers a distinct blend of genuine emotion and laugh-out-loud humor. In a streaming world that thrives on conformity, The Rehearsal is the audacious outlier that delivers a wholly unique viewing experience.
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Jul 11, 2022
Season 1 Review:
There aren’t many shows, especially in the comedy world, taking the chances that The Rehearsal does. Nor are they lucky enough to be led by someone like Fielder, a comic visionary who has, once again, turned a parody of reality TV into a brilliant dissection of human nature.
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The Daily BeastJul 11, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The Rehearsal is a masterpiece of awkward chaos that plays as both an extension and expansion of his heralded Comedy Central series Nathan for You. ... Fielder takes things so far that it’s difficult to imagine how he concocted this lunacy and impossible to stop laughing at the bravado of his peculiar showmanship.
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ColliderJul 11, 2022
Season 1 Review:
The Rehearsal gives Fielder the scope and breadth to fully explore his craziest ideas, and it truly seems as though Fielder has immensely grown as a storyteller and created one of the hands-down funniest shows of 2022. With Nathan For You, Nathan Fielder proved he was a brilliant comedic mind, but with The Rehearsal, Fielder proves he just might be a genius.
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Apr 15, 2025
Season 2 Review:
It reaffirms that Fielder is as much of a conceptual artist as he is a comedian or TV show creator, imbuing what other comics would treat as disposable bits with great depth, and committing to them to an extent that beggars belief. Season two might not have an Angela, but it’s a stronger, smarter, more thematically coherent show, and one that doesn’t flirt with outright cruelty the way some accused season one of doing.
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May 8, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Fielder is not unlike the pilots he’s studying, struggling to articulate himself under duress. By design, his exercises force him to confront his flaws and discover an inner confidence. He appears determined, to paraphrase Evanescence, to save himself from the nothing he’s become.
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Jul 11, 2022
Season 1 Review:
There were times I wanted The Rehearsal to be more conventionally structured or even more conventionally funny; it gets weirdly poignant at times — or poignantly weird, I’m not sure which — as it walks a fine line between inspired and demented. (One participant’s comparison of Fielder to Willy Wonka isn’t all that far off.) But I can honestly say I’ve seen nothing like it on television before.
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IndieWireJul 11, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Anyone tuning in purely for a good time will find plenty of well-orchestrated punchlines, off-the-cuff chuckles, and meme-able moments. Reality fans will latch on to a number of indelible characters, as Fielder continues to dig up priceless, one-of-a-kind personas. But most of all, “The Rehearsal” will move you. Even as a genre hybrid, rigorously blending raw reactions with scripted machinations, Fielder’s series honestly explores his subjects’ journeys as well as his own.
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Jul 18, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Although there are some uncomfortable laughs in the series, I wouldn’t classify it as a comedy so much as a genre-bending experience. I never quite knew what was real, how I was supposed to respond, or even what I felt. ... The Rehearsal is a metastasizing metafiction that keeps you on the edge of your seat—even though the show’s premise is to completely eradicate all suspense and contingency from life.
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Jul 14, 2022
Season 1 Review:
Uncomfortably funny, sneakily poignant and conceptually bananas. ... What starts as a life-hacking satire becomes a reality-comedy “Inception.” ... Entertaining but also disorienting. You are constantly gauging which sentiments are genuine, which emotions are more real than others, which scenes to invest in. ... And there’s a tender, even beautiful side to its surreal moments.
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Apr 21, 2025
Season 2 Review:
The fact that Fielder conflates his pursuit to the Wright brothers is as ridiculous as you would expect from The Rehearsal. But that doesn’t negate that Fielder may be on to something here, and watching how that plays out this season already feels like a weird kind of appointment TV.
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Apr 15, 2025
Season 2 Review:
The reward is a season of truly audacious TV that, at many points, is not only unlike anything else currently airing, but is genuinely unlike anything else I've ever seen, period. The catch is that Fielder is wrestling with the exact same questions he's been wrestling with since Nathan for You began in 2013.
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Apr 15, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Fielder continues to have a knack for finding extreme personalities happy to show their quirks on camera, but “The Rehearsal” remains a show about his own journey. .... This may be why the story of Season 2, if not its undeniably impressive stunts, can feel auxiliary — like a spinoff with an extremely specific, transportation-related theme.
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Jul 15, 2022
Season 1 Review:
In the case of The Rehearsal, the agenda is not always clear and takes on almost a free-association quality starting with the third episode. This will be fine for some viewers who enjoy watching the elaborate deceptions that Fielder and his production crew engage in to keep their simworld going, but ultimately it comes down to what you think of Nathan Fielder and his inward musings.
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Apr 21, 2025
Season 2 Review:
Its branched-off farce becomes the star’s creative adversary, chopping up his comedic flow. At his sharpest, Fielder’s Nathan makes a viewer want to curl up in a corner even as they’re laughing. But the second season’s broader excursions sprawl beyond his control, with jokes dragging far beyond the zone of discomfort into blank boredom.
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Apr 15, 2025
Season 2 Review:
This is arguably the point of it all — Fielder trying to set up the most extreme contrast between the task at hand and what his fictionalized self really cares about — but comedically, it doesn’t quite mesh. The season’s biggest laughs rarely have anything to do with his struggle for connection. And at the same time, the ridiculousness of how he tries to address the crash problem undercuts any attempt to play the personal material — including a discussion of whether Nathan is on the autism spectrum — even vaguely seriously.
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Jul 18, 2022
Season 1 Review:
A somber, introspective and highly mannered take on the prank show — Comedy Central meets Charlie Kaufman. ... But if the result is too often forced and airless, at least Fielder can boast once again that he’s created another singular series that doesn’t resemble anything else on television.
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Aug 9, 2022
Season 1 Review:
In voice-over, Nathan expresses an odd bewilderment about his power to “create feelings for other people’s rehearsals” but not for himself. It’s a bewilderment that reflects the intellectual and emotional blankness at the center of “The Rehearsal.” ... His cleverness masks the hollowness of his schemes. No digression, no incidentals, no loose ends can intrude on Fielder’s taut, compact, self-contained sketches. He looks the Look at the people he films, but doesn’t seem to see them.
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