Huh, a whole bunch of people from The Rehearsal are on Cameo now
It's a real treat for anyone who watched all six episodes of Nathan Fielder's bizarre reality show and thought "I need in on that!"
Consider this: You’ve successfully made it through all six episodes of the first season of Nathan Fielder’s HBO show The Rehearsal, thus giving yourself a sort of bachelor’s degree in the queasy, intentionally distressing intersection between reality, reality TV, and the human brain that Fielder’s show traffics in. Now, though, you’re wondering how to continue your education. How do you bring your discomfort with the way the camera distorts and warps the human psyche to a graduate level of study?
Might we suggest Cameo?
Because, wouldn’t you know it: A lot of people who appeared on The Rehearsal as Fielder’s various subjects are now on the pay-for-video service, offering you the chance to also know what it’s like to have an awkward filmed interaction with a relative stranger where it’s not at all clear who’s actually exploiting who.
Specifically, a quick search of the service reveals that you can now purchase personalized videos from Kor Skeete, the subject of the first episode of the series, as well as Angela Sankovich, whose rehearsal on child-rearing takes up a large portion of the show’s first season. The service is also offering interactions with some of the “side characters” (which is to say, human beings) from the show, including numbers-obsessed Robbin Stone, Kor’s friend Trish (a.k.a. “Cheap Chick In The City”), and Cantor Miriam Eskenasy, the teacher who Nathan goes to for Jewish education for his fake son Adam, and who then stuns him with some of her, let’s say, strong opinions on Israel’s role in history.
So, yeah: We’re right here trying to parse the ethics of all this, too. After all, we have a whole crew of people here who were made somewhat famous by a TV show that was at last partially based around deceiving them, now leveraging that celebrity for their own totally legal and ethically fine profit. This is good, right? (We may have watched too much Nathan Fielder content at this point to know that this is good.) Honestly, though, we’re just terrified we’re going to log on to Cameo some day and see Remy, the “fart doctor” kid, calling people “pretend daddy” for $40 a pop. And, god, what if Fielder catches wind of it? What if the Cameos get incorporated into that second season? The rabbit hole on this show, it really never stops.