Get the latest gossip
The Rehearsal Recap: 50 First Dates
Nathan goes on a side quest to help a shy co-pilot’s love life. It’s time and money well spent.
One of the sinister tricks of documentaries — to say nothing of their mutant cousin, the reality show — is how easily they make us forget about their essential artifice and invest in humans who we accept as living normally, even though what they’re doing is taking place in front of a camera. This season, he’s poured HBO money into, say, a meticulous full-scale studio replica of a Houston airport terminal or a San Jose apartment circa 2011, but the interactions within those environments, often by actors trained in “ the Fielder method,” are conspicuously stilted and weird. The episode doesn’t get any funnier than the opening, which pays off Fielder’s obligations to the contestants of Wings of Voice, the Canadian Idol clone he’d created entirely as a means to prompt his co-pilot judges to tell people news they didn’t want to hear.
Or read this on VULTURE