The comedians new show,The Rehearsal,is his grandest experiment yet.
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Im not going to be very funny in the room.
This was not necessarily a case of false modesty.
Fielder did not initially strike all of his friends and colleagues as the most engaging personality.
Who?That guy?
the comedian remembered thinking.
Hes deceptive, said Jimmy Kimmel, who has had Fielder on his show several times.
Maybe even a guy Id be bummed I had to sit next to on a plane.
He took the genre I stumbled into and moved it forward.
Fielder lives in Silver Lake, but he seems to belong to that world, too.
There are multiple streams of internet discourse devoted to identifying the source of his inexplicable attractiveness.
Perhaps its not so inexplicable.
Out in the world, he is witty, self-deprecating, and successful.
Heidecker, who eventually came to appreciate his subtle charms, described him as the consummate straight man.
Hes a really fun person to be an idiot around, he said.
When I got them, they were kittens, he said.
Jackie was the outcast.
I was like,I want her, Fielder said.
She maybe has some behavioral issues, he added uncertainly.
A cat, of course, is a creature that doesnt cooperate with anyones agenda but its own.
Fielder can be the same way.
We sat at the kitchen table, and I finally asked how he was doing.
Well, I hate talking about myself, he said.
He claimed this had something to do with a lifelong struggle to articulate his thoughts.
(Not a breast, he clarified.)
I still, to this day, feel like I dont know a lot of words.
He shook his head.
Did he claw you?
He saw me writing something in my notebook.
Are you writing Cat clawing Nathan?
Cat does not like Nathan, he continued.
Nathans own cat does not like him.
What would I have to do to make you bail?
The Rehearsal,like all of Fielders work, is not quite what it seems at first.
The Fielder who greets him isnt exactly like the one we have seen before.
He is warmer, more inclined to smile.
He notices a lot of doors in the apartment.
Door city over here!
he exclaims with a shy grin.
The teacher laughs awkwardly.
Fielder has come to this apartment to offer what may sound like an extraordinary gift.
What if we could take control of our futures?
He had recently wrapped the final season ofNathan for Youand was trying to figure out what to do next.
Fielder says Comedy Central wanted more seasons of the show, but he was ready to move on.
That night at dinner, Fielder suggested they make a show together.
He wanted to pour his energy into something, Wilson told me.
And he completely changed my life.
The episodes take inspiration from the most basic genre of internet content: the instructional video.
But Wilson is not actually interested in teaching anyone how to make risotto.
Today, they were trying to hammer together a provisional script for an episode of the shows third season.
The topic filled Wilsons heart with trepidation.
Is there anything new, Fielder asked, on the public-bathroom front?
Its all relative to the sound other people make, Fielder proposed.
If other people are farting a lot, youll never feel self-conscious.
Koman disagreed: I think all it takes is a pair of shoes to just completely seize up.
Wilson, peering through thick glasses, nodded.
Fielder clasped his hands together professorially.
Obviously, its terrifying to make any noise in a bathroom with other people, he conceded.
At Fielders prompting, they considered the amazing variety of public toilets throughout the city.
Fielder proposed sending Wilson to a morgue to interview its employees about the bathroom politics of the place.
The challenge would be getting those people to respond honestly.
On the Zoom, he suggested that Wilson interview the workers without telling them the episode was about bathrooms.
When Fielder was13, he had a friend whose father and grandfather were both magicians.
One day, the friend showed him a simple card trick.
Fielder begged him to teach him how to do it.
He and the friend joined the Vancouver Magic Circle, the only kids in a sea of old men.
Its not that impressive, he warned, slipping a worn business card from his wallet.
With a flick of his wrist, the card disappeared.
I asked him to do it again.
No, Im not going to do it again.
Our table was illuminated by the ambient glow of an enormous sign affixed to an ITSUGAR across the street.
I asked Fielder what drew him to magic as a kid.
His hesitation to answer this sort of question did not come as a surprise.
Youre looking for the logical connections.
Its nice to tell a story that way, but I dont know if thats always whats happening.
He fiddled with his chopsticks, rolling them in his fingers.
On Halloween, Fielders parents would take away his candy and replace it with healthier snacks.
They sent him to a Jewish elementary school that he remembers mostly for its emphasis on Holocaust education.
They were showing us dead bodies at a very young age, he said.
At 13, he transferred to a large public school, a bewildering experience.
I didnt understand how people made friends, he said.
Performing magic, he soon discovered, was easier than conjuring small talk.
Youre saying, Heres what were going to engage about.
And then when the trick is done, the interaction ends, he said with a laugh.
Around that time, he joined the high-school improv team.
He bought a video camera and made hundreds of experimental shorts.
Katie Crown, a frequent collaborator, recalled that Fielder had a particular idea of fun.
In one, he sits down with a professional matchmaker and inquires when they will get to the kiss.
Is this a hypothetical question, or does he really expect her to kiss him?
Okay, he presses on.
Are you feeling like youre ready?
She tries to break the tension with a joke.
Sure, she says, laughing, We just wont tell my husband.
Okay, he replies.
The camera lingers on her panicked expression as her laughter slowly grows brittle and dies.
By the end of the segment, he is holding his face inches from hers.
He would ask about every dish.
He would ask what the ingredients were.
I remember him asking about chicken teriyaki for, like, three minutes Whats in it?
Whats in the sauce?
Do you like it?
to the point where the server was like, I dont have time for this.
But he was not joking he could not order.
When Benjamin first watched it, he was struck by how much of Fielder he saw in the work.
He was kind of exposing his own obsessive personality disorder, he said.
But Fielders interests had always been more obscure.
One of the artists he admires is the British mentalist and illusionist Derren Brown.
In its best moments,Nathan for Youdidnt just make you laugh.
The episode took more than six months to make.
Fielder begins his quest by hiring a fourth-generation circus performer to teach him how to walk on a wire.
Then he disposes of Corey, hiding him for two weeks in a trailer in the Mojave Desert.
In reality, this performance was a grueling test of stamina.
Hed torture himself to get a good scene.
Fielder said his motherthinks of what he does as ethnomethodology, an obscure discipline of sociocultural analysis.
Even after the students explained their assignments, the unwilling subjects felt manipulated and used.
yo, no more of these experiments, the sister of one student begged.
Were not rats, you know.
Watching the show, it was sometimes hard not to worry for the people who were in it.
Did they know what they were getting into?
The answer is not usually, at least not at first.
Fielder tended to appear after the contracts were signed and the cameras were rolling.
Some realized the joke early on and were happy to play along.
He was really intrigued by the horses, she said fondly.
That show was the best thing that could have happened to him, she said.
Others were upset by the experience.
He didnt feel any better when he saw the episode and realized it was all a joke.
It can be hard to tell just by watching the show how a given subject will feel about it.
Lynn was cast in one of the roles.
At one point, Fielder proposes an acting exercise.
He gazes into her eyes and instructs her to say I love you.
Im not believing that at this point, Fielder says in the episode.
Again, he says.
This happens 11 times, ending only when Lynn points out Fielder has tears in his eyes.
But that is also a large part of what can make the show itself unsettling to watch.
At his suggestion, the owner dispatches 40 of her employees to a small apartment.
The women look unamused.
The owner of the housecleaning service, Kandiie Tapia, is a Mexican immigrant.
During the taping, she found Fielder to be rude.
Youre the Help, right?
she recalled him asking her.
(No such exchange made it into the episode.)
It was a power move, she told me.
Like hes white and Im a minority and Im young.
She talked to her husband about dropping out, but he still thought the show could benefit the business.
If Id known what it really was, I would have said no, she said.
Im not gonna go on a show voluntarily to be made fun of.
Fielder said he was surprised and upset to learn how Tapia felt.
It kills me any time I hear people didnt like their experience, he said.
I remember her being very excited about it.
He pointed out that he is the one who is meant to look like a fool in the episode.
I definitely feel Im the most pathetic person in everything I do.
Sometimes they just want the promotion and theyre making the calculation, he said.
Sometimes they dont want to hurt my feelings because they can tell Im excited about it.
His goal was to give ordinary people an experience outside their day-to-day lives.
And generally people have an assumption of reality TV being a fairly absurd thing.
He said only one subject ever quit.
But maybe more people hadnt dropped out because of the very dynamic the show critiques.
But it might not be completely true, or later they might change their mind.
Its a weird paradox, he said.
The thing where were satirizing these power dynamics is also a challenge in making the show.
And we do get it wrong.
On a Wednesday afternoon, the stadium was packed and the crowd was shrieking.
What percentage of people here even knowWaterworldis a movie?
Even so, people would invariably say and do things Fielder had failed to see coming.
Its sort of universal that people want to have control over their lives, he said.
Theres something really funny to that compulsion.
We have zero control over where this water goes!
Its kind of good because we have a little risk of getting splashed, he said.
Once the action began, he sat very still, watching closely, his hands tucked beneath his legs.
Do you think they dye the water blue to make it look more like water?
Looks a little too blue.
Like theWaterworldshow,The Rehearsalinvolved the construction of an artificial reality.
It was a very expensive pilot, Fielder said.
The shows main story line features a woman who doesnt know whether she wants to have kids.
IfNathan for Youshowed how easily we could be deceived,The Rehearsalexplores our eagerness to deceive ourselves.
I often feel envious of others, Fielder says in the voice-over.
The way they can just believe.
At times, he seems to question the wisdom of manipulating people the way he does.
When the teacher likens him to Willy Wonka, he looks disturbed.
Isnt he the bad guy?
To engineer a moment of intimacy with the teacher, he takes him to a heated pool.
Hoping to get the guy to open up, he says he was once married.
The Fielder who appears in these scenes is not unlike the real Fielder.
Youre seeing me control and not wanting to share, he told me.
Im aware that Im like that, and so its in the show.
The thing is the thing.
You could give a shot to make a story and connect it for yourself, but … Its hard to know where ideas come from or why you feel something at a certain time.
After a pause, he added, I did go through a divorce.
After relaxing in the splash-free zone, he seemed a little more open to talking about what had happened.
Everything suddenly felt uncertain.
I was like,Wow, Im so bad at life, he said.
He wondered whether he could have done something, anything, differently.
One day, he broke down in the middle of a big meeting.
Losing control of his emotions, he said, was a very jarring experience.
I had a pain in my chest, he said.
I still get that, but not as much.
He was dating someone now, and theyd recently moved in together.
Its not always easy to let a person in like that, he said.
Its been really nice.
He was silent for a long moment.
Im, like, really happy.
Saying things out loud to his therapist that hed never said before had helped.
Ive shared everything with her, he said, and its been fine.
I asked if he had talked about our interview with his therapist.
His voice dropped to a low murmur.
I wanted to just lie right now.
He began to explain himself: He did notspecificallyschedule a session with her after speaking with me.
He just happened to have one scheduled.
Why am I telling you this shit?
he said, laughing in disbelief.
He was growing uncharacteristically animated.
I should have just lied to you just now!
But I know if I lied in that moment, I would have been caught.
Would he tell me what hed told her?
No, no, no!
I pointed out that this is what he does all the time probe for peoples hidden soft spots.
Of course, he said, but youre going for something different than I might be interested in.
He wanted to get authentic moments out of people, moments you never see on TV.
Narrative was just another magic trick, an illusion conjured in the edit room.
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Production Credits
*An earlier version of this piece misidentified Allie Viti.
It has since been updated.
