Nathan Fielder Fans Are Clinging to a Redditor’s Claim That the Kid From ‘The Rehearsal’ Wasn’t Really ‘Traumatized’

Good news for fans of TV comedy and/or being so palpably uncomfortable that your soul tries to claw its way out of your body: Nathan Fielder’s HBO series The Rehearsal is coming back. The show was officially renewed in 2022, and now we’ve gotten a trailer for the upcoming season, which will kick off in April. 

The teaser finds Fielder, and his now-trademark laptop harness, supervising a soundstage full of several identical replicas of the same home.

Some viewers seem to be surprised that The Rehearsal is coming back at all — not because the first season wasn’t good, but because the last episode may have seriously messed with a small child’s head.

In the Season One finale, “Pretend Daddy,” Nathan learns that one of the many child actors hired to play his son “Adam” in the elaborate domestic rehearsal he participates in, doesn’t seem to understand that it was just a TV show. Six-year-old Remy, aka Dr. Fart, doesn’t want to leave the set when his time there is finished. His mother reveals that Remy doesn’t have a father in his life, and has formed an attachment to Nathan, who he won’t stop referring to as “Daddy.”

While it’s entirely possible that this genuinely upsetting development was itself a fabrication, part of Fielder’s master plan for the season that had been mapped out well in advance, it certainly seemed authentic. After the finale aired, some viewers seemed to wonder whether or not The Rehearsal should have even been made in the first place, if its reality-manipulating experimentation ended up doing any harm to an emotionally-vulnerable child. 

But this concern was vocalized by Fielder himself. In the closing moments of the episode, Fielder restages his goodbye with Remy, with actors playing himself and the kid. Fielder takes on the role of the mother, who tells “Remy,” “Maybe we shouldn’t have done that show,” because it’s a “weird thing for a little kid to be a part of.” While he’s ostensibly roleplaying as the mom, clearly Fielder uses the moment to confess his own regrets about what happened. 

Despite that ethically-debatable ending, we’re about to get another season of The Rehearsal. While some people may be surprised about that, other Fielder fans have been defending the show’s continued existence with one Redditor’s posts about Remy. A user claiming to be the kid’s real-life grandmother has posted several pictures of Remy and his mom in the past, stressing that he’s “doing just fine” and “was not harmed or traumatized during the filming, as many people are claiming.”

Obviously, these posts haven’t been verified, but Remy did appear to be totally okay by the end of the episode. And “RemysMimi” also noted that Fielder seemed to genuinely care about Remy’s wellbeing off-camera, and a lot of his follow-up discussions with the child weren’t actually included in the episode. 

Of course, it’s also possible that this account is secretly being run by Fielder from his laptop harness.