TV’s sexiest cat daddy has been tinkering away in his laboratory of odd on-camera human behavior, creating an original series that, up until now, has been pretty secretive. Nathan Fielder, the inscrutable Canadian behind Comedy Central’s Nathan for You, is back with another social experiment disguised as deadpan comedy. His new series, The Rehearsal, is framed as a response to his previous show: When engineering the schemes for each episode, he wished there was a way to prepare, in advance, for every possibility that could occur. And he means every single possibility. Now, he’s got the premium-cable money to do exactly that.
The setup is that Fielder manufactures scenarios before they happen to real people — right down to building recreations of their homes. “I’ve learned that if you plan for every variable, a happy outcome doesn’t have to be left to chance,†Fielder says in the trailer. The footage suggests otherwise. Fielder is seen attacked by chickens, chased down by a man dressed as a boy, making a robot baby cry, dealing with an ambulance and stretcher, handling a block of raw meat, and getting called a liar by a woman in tears. (There’s also a shot of him in the pool, which is absolute bait for Women for Fielder.) The six-episode limited series premieres on HBO and HBO Max on Friday, July 15.