The Rehearsal’s emotional arc becomes “Nathan’s” arc.

But it spirals fast, with Fielder - well, not Fielder, but “Nathan,” the character he is playing in the show - inexorably moving away from his initial perch as creator, the god of the machinery who observes people from the margins, and toward being the center of the show. The show’s beginning feints in a completely bananas direction: that it’s possible to recreate all the possible outcomes of a complicated interaction, practice them to perfection, and somehow control the outcome. Nathan (or “Nathan”) observes a rehearsal in The Rehearsal. The goal has something to do with empathy, but maybe not in the way we usually think. In a way unusual in our ambiguity-averse age, The Rehearsal shoves you down a maze without a map or a thesis statement, entirely on purpose. Of course, it’s Door City over here because there are a lot of ways into The Rehearsal: it’s a show about reality TV, about parenting, about suspension of disbelief. The doll prop literalizes this image, a key to stick in the lock and open one possible door onto an explanation. Nathan is living his life, except it’s not a life at all it’s a world of pure imagination, with Nathan surrounded by props and lies and, as he puts it in the finale, “puzzles of my own devising.” A fake Dalmatian pokes his head over the table, and through the window we spot a sheet with a fake background of trees.

He appears to be surrounded by family, but a double-take reveals that the wife on his right is a life-sized woman doll, and the kid on his left in a beanie is a doll too, and so is the toddler in the high chair over his shoulder. In the picture, Nathan is at a dinner table, salting his food uncomfortably (Nathan does everything uncomfortably) and looking directly at us. That moment echoes the poster for the series, a frankly creepy image that’s been bugging the crap out of me since I first saw it.

The empathy exams book