OARacle Newsletter

The Rehearsal has created buzz among autistic viewers, as well as others. In this HBO reality TV series, comedian Nathan Fielder creates life-like practice sessions with sets and scripts to help people prepare for important life events. In season 1, he helped someone confess to a friend that they did not have a master’s degree though they had claimed to have one for years, for example.

Autistic fans have, as an article on Decider noted, “lauded The Rehearsal for accurately capturing what neurodivergent life feels like.” The twist is that Fielder has not discussed the possibility that he is autistic on the show. In the fifth episode of the second season, which focuses on aviation safety, he faces that possibility on camera.

He stumbles on a Consequence editorial about him and The Rehearsal by Sam Rosenberg, who is autistic. Fielder notes in episode 5 that Rosenberg’s article is “an odd perspective, since my show had nothing to do with autism, but as I kept Googling, I realized it was everywhere.” He spends the rest of that episode researching whether he has inadvertently become an autism expert, according to Slate, and whether he can get taken seriously in Congress as an advocate for autistic Americans as well as advocate for aviation safety.

In the Consequence article, Rosenberg unpacks Fielder’s approach, methods, and the results they yield, often comparing them to the masking autistic people are compelled to do to fit in.

If anything, The Rehearsal displays the impossibility of applying our culture’s one-size-fits-all social logic to everyday experiences. More often than not, the situations like the ones Fielder puts himself in only seem daunting and stressful because our culture does not value compassion, only flawlessness. This inevitably normalizes a very narrow idea of what a favorable outcome is supposed to look like.

“…Through a lens of disability, [Fielder trying to make a good impression] speaks to the loneliness of how masking deprives autistic people of our humanity, of not being afforded the space for awkwardness and messiness in order to make other, more neurotypical, people feel comfortable and secure….Disabled or not, people are awkward and messy and say and do the wrong thing all the time. That’s what being human is. The Rehearsal recognizes that, while also acknowledging that getting and giving support to learn from our mistakes is essential to our personal development. Without clarity and precision, there’s risk, but with risk comes joy and catharsis.”

While Fielder doesn’t acknowledge that he may be autistic, he does open the airport he created for season two to autistic kids and uses the knowledge he acquired about masking in his proposal for pilots.

In a subsequent article that Rosenberg wrote for Consequence, he lauded Fielder for Fielder’s “attempt to understand human behavior through these ‘rehearsals,” which mirrored his own experiences of masking.” However, Rosenberg also has some reservations about the episode. The first is that one of autistic experts Fielder talks to is Dr. Doreen Granpeesheh, a psychologist at the Center for Autism and Related Disorders (CARD). Dr. Granpeesheh, he writes, “was involved in Vaxxed, a 2016 pseudoscience propaganda film that pushes the discredited yet sadly still prevalent belief that vaccines cause autism.” Rosenberg also expresses concern about CARD’s focus on applied behavioral analysis, because it seeks to “suppress autistic behaviors over embracing them,” a view some others in the autistic community share.

At the end of his article, though, Rosenberg writes that the episode inspired “more compassion and awareness around autistic people who are conditioned to mask because of how harshly we are judged for being ourselves. As faulty as his method may have been, Fielder’s fearlessness in using autistic masking to examine the age of avoidance we’re living in is commendable, vital, and powerful.”

Sherri Alms is the freelance editor of The OARacle, a role she took on in 2007. She has been a freelance writer and editor for more than 20 years.