Max's Best New Show Lands A Perfect 100% Critic Score
The Rehearsal
While all the conversation around Max right now (please, just change it back to HBO at this point) is about season 2 of The Last of Us, especially after last night, a returning show is about to land on the service with a perfect 100% critic score, and one that is already 'certified fresh,' the site's highest honor.
That show would be Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal season 2, the absurdist comedy that last aired in 2022, and got a 95% score back then. Audiences were almost just as on board, with just a slightly lower 88% score there. The show ultimately had enough viewership to return for a second season. Here's the synopsis:
'Nathan Fielder returns to television to explore the lengths one person will go to reduce the uncertainties of everyday life. Fielder stars as the director of rehearsals, which are elaborately staged scenarios re-creating parts of ordinary people's lives that are meant to help them prepare for a big moment in their lives. A construction crew, a legion of actors and seemingly unlimited resources all come together to allow ordinary people to rehearse for these moments by giving them the opportunity to play them out in carefully crafted simulations of Fielder's own design.'
Things have just spiraled from this original concept, with more basic problems for individuals now going all the way to building fake airplanes to test pilots and a whole bunch of other things that are hard to even grasp in season 2's trailer, which you can see below:
It is hard to explain just how weird this show is, but if you are at all familiar with Fielder's work, whether that's Nathan For You or The Curse, then yeah, this probably makes sense. But even then, this is all just above and beyond what he's done in the past, and thankfully Max is essentially letting him do whatever he wants with this increasingly bizarre series.
It just came out. The Rehearsal season 2 will air on Sundays, alongside The Last of Us, so we have some time to brace ourselves for what's coming the rest of the season. But even then, I doubt most of us are going to be ready for the places this is about to go. We'll find out soon enough.
Follow me on Twitter, YouTube, and Bluesky
Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
CNET
4 hours ago
- CNET
French Open 2025: How to Watch, Stream Rybakina vs. Świątek Free From Anywhere
Iga Świątek's pursuit of a record-breaking fourth consecutive French Open title faces its toughest challenge yet as she takes on old rival Elena Rybakina. Below, we'll outline the best live TV streaming services to use to watch the match as it happens, wherever you are in the world, and how to use a VPN if it's not available where you are. Świątek has the recent bragging rights, with the Polish star coming into this clash having won the previous two encounters between the pair this year in Doha and at the United Cup in Australia. No. 12 seed Rybakina nevertheless holds an edge in Masters and Grand Slams, with key wins in the Rome Masters, Indian Wells and the Australian Open back in 2023. This round-of-16 clash is already underway on Court Philippe Chatrier at Stade Roland Garros in Paris. Iga Swiatek is on a 24-match winning streak at Roland to watch Elena Rybakina vs. Iga Świątek in the US The French Open will be shown across TNT Sports channels: TNT, TBS and truTV. You can also watch every match shown on TV plus hundreds of others not available on the TNT channels on Max. Four of the five major live-TV streaming services include the TNT Sports channels -- all but Fubo -- but the cheapest way to watch the French Open is by signing up for a month of Max. Max Max Every match for $17 per month You need the $17-a-month Standard plan to watch live sports on Max. (Either that or the $21-a-month Premium plan that adds 4K streaming.) Max will show 900 matches from the French Open, including more than 800 that are exclusive to Max and not shown on TNT or TruTV. And you'll be able to watch up to four matches at once with Max's multi-view feature. Read our Max review. See at Max How to watch the French Open free from anywhere with a VPN If you find yourself unable to view the tournament locally, you may need a different way to watch -- that's where using a VPN can come in handy. A VPN is also the best way to stop your ISP from throttling your speeds on game day by encrypting your traffic. It's also a great idea if you're traveling and find yourself connected to a Wi-Fi network and you want to add an extra layer of privacy for your devices and logins. With a VPN, you're able to virtually change your location on your phone, tablet or laptop to get access to the game. So if your internet provider or mobile carrier has stuck you with an IP address that incorrectly shows your location in a blackout zone, a VPN can correct that problem by giving you an IP address in your correct, nonblackout area. Most VPNs, like our Editors' Choice, ExpressVPN, make it really easy to do this. Using a VPN to watch or stream sports is legal in any country where VPNs are legal, including the US, UK and Canada, as long as you have a legitimate subscription to the service you're streaming. You should be sure your VPN is set up correctly to prevent leaks: Even where VPNs are legal, the streaming service may terminate the account of anyone it deems to be circumventing correctly applied blackout restrictions. Looking for other options? Be sure to check out some of the other great VPN deals taking place right now. Sarah Tew/CNET ExpressVPN Best VPN for streaming ExpressVPN is our current best VPN pick for people who want a reliable and safe VPN and it works on a variety of devices. It's normally $13 a month but if you sign up for an annual subscription for $100 you'll get three months free and save 49%. That's the equivalent of $6.67 a month. Note that ExpressVPN offers a 30-day money-back guarantee. See at Expressvpn How to watch or stream Elena Rybakina vs. Iga Świątek in the UK Tennis fans in the UK will need to subscribe to Eurosport or the streaming service Discovery Plus to watch the French Open. Sarah Tew/CNET Discovery Plus Carries the French Open in the UK A subscription to Discovery Plus in the UK costs £7 per month or £60 for the year. The service is available on a wide array of devices and also includes access to all Eurosport TV channels. See at Discoveryplus How to watch or stream Elena Rybakina vs. Iga Świątek in Canada Canadian tennis fans can watch the tournament via streaming service TSN Plus. Existing TSN cable subscribers can watch at no extra charge using the details of their TV provider. You also watch the French-language broadcast on RDS. How to watch or stream Elena Rybakina vs. Iga Świątek in Australia free Good news for sports fans Down Under: They can watch the French Open without paying a cent, thanks to free-to-air broadcaster Channel 9. That also means you'll be able to watch the tournament live online via its streaming service 9Now. Aussies also have a second option for streaming the action from Roland-Garros via pay TV sports network Stan Sport, which is livestreaming every match on every court without ads. A Stan Sport subscription costs AU$15 per month on top of a AU$12 Stan subscription. Quick tips for streaming the French Open using a VPN
Yahoo
4 hours ago
- Yahoo
NEWS OF THE WEEK: J.K. Rowling on New Harry Potter Cast: 'I Couldn't Be Happier'
J.K. Rowling has broken her silence on the new stars of the upcoming Harry Potter TV series, saying: 'All three are wonderful. I couldn't be happier.' Her comment came in response to a fan on X (formerly Twitter) who praised the newly announced leads. Dominic McLaughlin as Harry, Arabella Stanton as Hermione, and Alastair Stout as Ron. The trio were selected from over 32,000 auditions across the UK and Ireland. Filming begins this summer, and the series—spanning seven seasons—is set to air on HBO with a reported budget of £75 million per episode.
Atlantic
5 hours ago
- Atlantic
Between Tradition and Modernity Stands One Bumbling Rabbi
In recent years, an impressive number of particularly charming actors have played rabbis on TV. Adam Brody, Sarah Sherman, Daveed Diggs, and Kathryn Hahn have all donned a kippah, wrapped themselves in a tallis, and shown how fun loving (even sexy) it can feel to carve a path between the rock of tradition and the hard place of modernity. I'm not sure why progressive rabbis are the clerics to whom pop culture tends to assign this role, as opposed to, say, quirky priests or wacky imams. Maybe Judaism is well suited as a religion that revels in questioning and doubt. Maybe rabbis are just funnier. Add to the scroll of TV clergy Rabbi Léa Schmoll, played by Elsa Guedj. In Reformed, a new French series now streaming on Max, Léa has the joyful burden of making millenia-old rituals matter anew. Unlike many other shows that feature rabbis, this one focuses on the actual work of rabbi-ing—and it isn't easy. The drama (and sitcom-style comedy) of Reformed comes out of her struggle against both the nihilism of our fallen world, which provides no answers to the bigger questions of life, and a rigid form of Orthodoxy that provides too many easy answers. In the middle stands utterly human Léa, who has the sweetly befuddled air, wild mane, and wide eyes of a young Carol Kane. Her shirts are often misbuttoned and half-tucked. She's perpetually late. And she is brand-new to the job, having just taken her first rabbi gig when the show opens in her hometown of Strasbourg, in eastern France. She is also a woman rabbi in a country where they are rare—the show makes a running gag of what title to use for her, because both the French word for a female rabbi, rabbine, and a stuffier alternative, Madame le rabbin, sound so unfamiliar that they regularly provoke giggles. After rabbinical school, she moves back into the book-lined apartment of her misanthropic father, a weathered Serge Gainsbourg look-alike (Éric Elmosnino, who actually played Gainsbourg in a biopic). He's a psychotherapist and a staunch atheist for whom a rabbi daughter is a cosmic joke at his expense. 'There was Galileo, Freud, Auschwitz,' he declares over dinner when she discusses her new job. 'I thought the problem was solved. God doesn't exist. The Creation is meaningless. We're alone. We live. We suffer.' (In French—I promise—this sounds like a very normal dinner conversation.) Already in the first episode, in her very first interaction with a congregant, Léa has to defend one of the most primitive forms of religious practice: circumcision. A new mother asks for Léa's help in convincing her non-Jewish partner to get over his resistance to their son having a bris. She senses—after many initial bumbling missteps—that what pains the father is that his son's body will be different from his own, no longer an extension of himself. Léa reaches for a biblical story, the binding of Isaac. As they stand outside the synagogue, where the father has been nervously pacing, drinking espressos, and smoking cigarettes (again, France), she offers her explanation for God's seemingly sadistic command that Abraham sacrifice his son. This was done, she argues, not to test Abraham's faith—God, being omniscient, would presumably know Abraham's faithfulness already—but ultimately to stop Abraham's hand before he brought his knife down, proving the limits of a parent's power over their child's life. Shira Telushkin: The new American judaism As Léa tells it, this brutal story becomes a comforting parable about learning to stop projecting yourself onto your children, about letting them go. 'The binding of Isaac is actually the moment when he is unbound from his father,' Léa says. 'God says to the Hebrews, 'Your children are not your children. They come from you. But they are not you.'' A bar mitzvah, a wedding, a Passover seder, and two funerals will follow. And though the same dynamic repeats, Léa's confidence grows as she learns how to give sense to the rituals. 'In the end, our job is about accomplishing certain gestures and trying to understand their meaning,' she says, providing a pretty good synopsis of the show. Interpretation is her creative act, and part of what makes Reformed enthralling is that she gets really good at it. Reformed is roughly based on the book Living With Our Dead, by Delphine Horvilleur, which was published in an English translation last year. Horvilleur is a liberal rabbi (she'll even accept 'secular rabbi') who has become something of a celebrity in France. The book would not seem to be an obvious fit for adaptation into a comedy series—in it, she recounts 11 instances of mourning, and how she has worked to integrate death into her life. She also argues eloquently for her more liberal form of the religion. The birth of rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, in 70 C.E., was the moment, she writes, when exegesis began to trump blind obedience. The rabbis were exiled, and had no temple where they could make sacrifices to God. They invented a religion that was a form of 'literal a-theism,' she writes, 'a world where God doesn't intervene and where human decisions prevail when there is controversy.' In the show, Léa has an antagonist on this point, a soulful local Orthodox rabbi named Arié (Lionel Dray) who was once her teacher. The friction in their relationship is more than just theological—their 'Will they? Won't they?' sexual tension adds another sitcom element to the show (though given his black fedora and many children at home, I'm guessing they won't). They tussle in a friendly, and sometimes not-so-friendly, way about whether an 'authentic' form of Judaism exists. In one climactic scene, while on an interfaith panel discussion, their argument overwhelms the event. Arié refers to Léa's approach to Judaism as 'à la carte': She picks and chooses what suits her interests. 'Why not practice meditation or oriental-spirituality seminars, if the goal is to confirm one's own beliefs?' he asks her. Léa shoots back by asking him if he practices polygamy. Religion evolves, she says, and besides, 'many people aspire to connect with the wisdom of biblical texts, and they have a right to it, even if you claim exclusive ownership of them.' That's fine, Arié responds, but 'don't call it Judaism. Because that's not Judaism. It's something else.' Franklin Foer: The golden age of American Jews is ending As someone who is on Léa's side of this debate—I agree with Horvilleur that 'Judaism doesn't require its adherents to pass a final exam'—I appreciated her fierce defense of this more open-ended version of the religion, as well as her look of self-doubt as she was arguing it. Judaism that tries to be alive to a changing world has an inferiority complex. It's not even a fair fight when one side takes the accommodation of reality as its mandate and the other cites the direct mandate of God. Léa's work seems more rewarding, though, because the comfort she provides feels more like grace. When she teaches a man sitting alone with his mother's coffin about the Jewish tradition of tearing a piece of your clothes when in mourning, explaining that it symbolizes 'that the survivor will never be entirely whole again,' the gesture breaks the stark nothingness on the son's face. I'm moved by watching a show that finds drama in all of this, because, at the moment, I'm helping my 12-year-old daughter prepare for her bat mitzvah. She has to write a speech responding to the section of Torah she will be reading, one that includes the biblical proscription to 'not boil a kid in its mother's milk.' From this, early rabbis extrapolated the strict dietary laws that prohibit mixing milk and meat. My daughter had a different reading, though. In a commentary on the text, she found that in the ancient Near East, meat cooked in soured milk was a delicacy. Maybe God didn't intend for this to be a restriction on food at all, she wondered. Maybe he was just asking people to not show off by eating fancy dishes. Maybe he was telling them to live simply. I liked that in the old words she found her own significance, one an Orthodox rabbi like Arié would find ridiculous but that Léa would smile at. Reformed is a lot more entertaining than this doctrinal back-and-forth would suggest. The show is ultimately about people feeling confused as they face life at the moments that most require an injection of meaning. Can religion still have purpose for those of us who don't believe? The show answers with a qualified yes—as long as it is religion that is never too sure of itself. 'There are lots of rabbis full of certainties,' Arié tells Léa in one consoling moment. 'Perhaps all those who are looking for something else need you.'
