Modern Existentialism with Nathan Fielder

The creator, Nathan Fielder, who finished Nathan for You 5 years ago and produced How to with John Wilson, decided to help the series’ participants – reality show style – by having them repeat entertainments similar to the conflict they want to face, professional interpreters who pretend to be the people involved. And a group that repeats in detail the space in which the situation will occur.

It’s hard to visualize the proposal given how surreal and absurd it is, in a documentary key, but the pilot effectively summarizes the rules of the game that will be developed throughout the season. Chapter one shows a professor wanting to confess to his friend that he doesn’t have a graduate degree, so Nathan, to his aid, will faithfully recreate the bar they frequent, hire extras to fill it, and they will rehearse whatever is possible. Decisions with an actress. It may be run to try to make the final situation as painful as possible.

In the age of simulation culture, this game of mirrors, easily reminiscent of Charlie Kaufman – more specifically Synecdoche, New York – suggests a more perverted distortion of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show, in which the event is represented by something like the presenter that would direct the Machiavellian program that followed Jim Carrey, but marked With endearing shyness — and sometimes arrogance — fueled by his paradoxical search for affection.

The series is a harrowing play of what the cognitive behavioral group calls overthinking or rumination, a psychological drama by Jodorowsky playing in twisting the loop to infinity, an exercise in metallic language that uses subtlety to delve deeper into human behavior through the documentary genre, updating the contemporary crisis of reality in an attempt to To find the truth in the most artificial angles.

The New Yorker The Trials criticized Nathan’s treatment of his participants, who, for help, eventually turned into caricatured dolls of La Mirada – in large letters – of the neurotic protagonist. Nacho Vigalondo, who worked before becoming a film director and/or host on Late Night on Big Brother 2nd Edition, commented on a Twitter post, “Why doesn’t anyone ever say that people who appear are actually COBRA?” The series, from its apparent honesty, suggests a moral debate about the limits on which self-positioning is difficult.

Far from being cruel or benevolent in Nathan’s social experience, HBO Max’s commitment to producing such a different proposition is surprising, one whose budget doesn’t seem to have limits either, and who manages to embody the radical episodes of self-awareness in tangible physical form. Especially the visual. In a couple of weeks, the final episode of The Trials will be released, and it will be possible to discover if the chaos beyond the narrative is headed somewhere and whether Nathan’s goal of including the inaccessible has been achieved.