Embrace the cringe in The Rehearsal Season 2

Plane crashes have been high profile news lately. So now imagine finding out that the pilot of your Boeing 737 flight is comedian Nathan Fielder (executive producer of How To With John Wilson Season 1-3), your flight is being filmed for his HBO “comedy” docuseries, and his aim is to prove his wild theory that most plane crashes are caused by the authoritarian power structure of the cockpit, which prevents co-pilots from challenging the captain. Oh, and he got the job thanks to an FAA loophole that allowed him to step behind the controls with only 270-280 hours of “rehearsal” experience instead of the required minimum of 1 500 hours for commercial pilots. Side note: he hasn’t quite gotten the hang of landing yet.

Your in-flight movie would be Final Destination. Your meal options would be your fingernails, or horse tranquilisers. And Nathan Fielder isn’t pulling off this stunt with a conman’s slick charm and outrageous confidence. He still has the same aura of being an self-absorbed alien piloting a human robot that we saw in the first season of The Rehearsal – in which he seemed to give the child actor pretending to be his son abandonment issues – or in his comedy-drama series The Curse.

But Nathan thinks we need to toughen up. During his press tour for The Curse, he pointed out, “When I hear, like, ‘Oh, it’s cringey,’ and someone’s like, ‘I can’t handle it,’ I wonder how that person can go through life at all. Because every interaction is horrendous almost all in some way. Nothing ends with a cut when you’re in real life.”

Preach, we guess. 

Taking a leaf from Nathan’s book, before we watch The Rehearsal Season 2, we’re going to rehearse for one of life’s most challenging tasks – embracing cringe – with the help of 10 subject experts from our favourite movies and series. It’s awkward turtles all the way down, baby!

Binge The Rehearsal Season 1-2 on Showmax now.

Cringe binge quick links

Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) in Parks and Recreation Season 1-7

Joel (Jeff Hiller) in Somebody Somewhere Season 1-3

Niles Crane (David Hyde Pierce) in Frasier Season 1-11

Louis Litt (Rick Hoffman) in Suits Season 1-9

Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) in Hacks Season 1-4

Jared Dunnes (Zach Woods) in Silicon Valley Season 1-6

Stuart Pritchard (Stephen Merchant) in Hello Ladies

Michael Scott (Steve Carell) in The Office Season 1-9

Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) in Succession Season 1-4

Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) in Girls Season 1-6

Awkward turtles all the way down

Whether they have too much self awareness, or none at all, these characters have us tying ourselves in knots on their behalf as they plod across the wet cement floor of life, sucking and squelching all the way. Prepare to watch through your fingers, horror movie-style, as you shriek “Why would you do that?” into the void. PS: We’ve ranked them in from least to most cringe to help you to build resistance, but note that your personal cringe tolerance may vary.

1. Leslie Knope (Amy Poehler) in Parks and Recreation Season 1-7

Starting you off easily, Pawnee Indiana’s human sunbeam, Leslie, doesn’t wilt like a lettuce when people reject her schemes to build healthier, happier offices and parks; she just comes up with another way to attack the problem. She’s a human steamroller who wants the best for everyone. Sometimes all that passion and energy gets poured into the wrong place – like in Season 4, when she’s asked to help host a Model UN Club session for the local high school. Her competitive nature takes over and she winds up leading “her” country, Denmark, to war against Ben’s (Adam Scott) country, Peru, in retaliation for a personal dispute. Challenged to wave a white flag, Leslie barks back, “The only thing I’ll be waving is your decapitated head on a stick in front of your weeping mother!” There are children present, lady!

2. Joel (Jeff Hiller) in Somebody Somewhere Season 1-3

If you saw Joel on your doorstep, you’d think he was ringing your doorbell to sell religion. He’s dressed like a whole church elder, but there’s so much more to Joel because if friendship is magic, small town awkward adult Joel is one of the world’s most powerful magicians. Despite being the gay guy nobody remembers sharing a class with at school, Joel sees people. He takes note of what makes them tick, and he tries to help them when he spots an opportunity – which can create an alarming sense of emotional debt if this has never happened to you before. But Joel has built his town’s queer folk into a powerful community through this generosity, and despite being a pastor, he’s not doing it to rack up good boy points with God. Joel helps because of a deep sense of compassion. His worst sin is that he hates confrontation, which leads to some truly awkward moments, like when he doesn’t tell his BFF Sam (Bridget Everett) that he’s moving house. Whoops. 

3. Niles Crane (David Hyde Pierce) in Frasier Season 1-11

Frasier comes from a gentler time in comedy, before the start of the cringe comedy nuclear arms race. Yes, Frasier’s (Kelsey Grammer) psychiatrist little brother Niles is socially awkward, but he’s also at ease with who he is. He’s accepting and even happy with that self – despite his A-Z compilation of neuroses, and his awareness of how other people see him (or how he believes they see him (the scene in which he dresses up as his police detective dad and claims to be disappointed in his sons is still hard to watch). He’s an obsessive social climbing snob with a razor-sharp wit, but he also has the physical comedy skills of Mr Bean when he’s flailing about with a fire extinguisher or sitting naked in a coffee shop, so it balances out.

4. Louis Litt (Rick Hoffman) in Suits Season 1-9

Corporate attorney Louis is an anomaly in the world of Pearson Hardman’s glamorous, charismatic, legal hotshots. While his colleagues are the popular kids all grown up, Louis found his school community among the Dungeons & Dragons and Glee club nerds, and he’s still carrying a chip on his shoulder from being the bullied smart kid at school. Clients and colleagues tend to find his aggressive attitude off putting, as he focuses on intimidating rather than charming his way to success. And his blinkered determination to be right instead of nudging the goal posts over for the sake of friendship results in his work “friends” plotting behind his back, adding to his insecurities when he catches them out. Make no mistake, though, there’s a kitty-cat-loving, woman-adoring marshmallow heart beneath that awkward turtle shell. He just has a lot of emotions, okay?

5. Ava Daniels (Hannah Einbinder) in Hacks Season 1-4

Serial boss blackmailer and awkward turtle Ava is a comedy writer first, and a human disaster second. Working for 70-something standup comedian Deborah Vance (Jean Smart) shines a spotlight on all of Ava’s insecurities. Deborah might be vain and difficult, but she’s also far too self-assured to be awkward about it. Ava, however, still has delusions about herself and her place in the world, and since nobody in Deborah’s circle can resist a joke, Ava’s self-righteousness might become the biggest joke of them all. If you’re looking for cringe, though, nothing in the whole series can quite match up to watching Ava becoming crushed by the weight of her guilt during a friendly road trip with Deborah at the start of Season 2, after sending a tell-all email in which she slags off Deborah to someone who’s writing a series about an abusive boss at the end of Season 1. What a horror show. 

6. Jared Dunnes (Zach Woods) in Silicon Valley Season 1-6

Mike Judge’s satire of mid-2010s tech startup culture is packed with awkward characters. Alas, just as nerds are embracing their destiny as the heroes of the modern world, the infiltration of corporate bro culture has already begun. In each startup, a war is underway between the software visionaries and their exploiters. But when Jared moves from tech giant Hooli to join Pied Piper as head of business development, his awkwardness stands out even among the nerd herd. Just watch him conduct an increasingly deranged opinion poll among people on the street at the end of Season 1. In Season 2, after making his “first non-assailant bro,” Jared goes overboard into bro culture, even trying to pitch “bros before hoes” as a business strategy, before accidentally quoting Hitler in the same season. He would be awful, if he wasn’t the first to admit how pathetic he is. His secret? In Season 4 he reveals, “I’ve always been very adept at taking the shape of whatever shoe is pressed down upon me so I can try to make it work.” 

7. Stuart Pritchard (Stephen Merchant) in Hello Ladies

A gangly British web designer on the make in Los Angeles, Stuart is up against not just a cultural gap, but his own over-eagerness to impress “the ladies”, as he sets about the dating scene like a horse at a picnic. Like Nathan Fielder, Stephen Merchant has a gift for acting like he’s hiding the fact that he’s secretly a praying mantis. Most of Stuart’s awkwardness seems to stem from the fact that he’s a fairly nice person who’s desperate for attention, but is dead-set on getting it by imitating the world’s worst people as he follows their imaginary rule book of “power plays”. Sometimes, though, it’s just him not thinking things through, or pushing through despite signs that he should change track – like when he repeatedly yells an off-colour catch phrase at his date while they’re in a noisy bar.

8. Hannah Horvath (Lena Dunham) in Girls Season 1-6

In this comedy series about four friends who’re growing up and growing apart, not even the monstrous egotism of her friends can eclipse Hannah’s self-centred “me-me-me” awkwardness. Until her parents pull the financial plug, trust fund baby Hannah is raised to believe that the world revolves around her. But she’s also had her ear to the ground about social justice issues and as “a voice of a generation”, she’d like to put in her two cents about how everything impacts her, first. A classic cringe moment has to be her Season 2, episode 2 fight with her new boyfriend Sandy (Donald Glover), a political Conservative, as she tries to show off how much she knows about issues impacting Black people by asking him to critique an essay of hers. Her asking to borrow his copy of Ayn Rand’s libertarian novel The Fountainhead as her introduction to a booty call should probably have been our first clue that she had some sort of weird fetishisation going on.

9. Michael Scott (Steve Carell) in The Office Season 1-9

Even fans who re-watch The Office on repeat as their ultimate comfort show will pause before pressing play on the utterly unbearable Scott’s Tots episode. King Cringe himself, paper company manager Michael Scott, has to admit to a classroom full of disadvantaged graduating students that he won’t be able to give them the scholarships he promised them nine years back in a fit of optimism. Caught up in his own embarrassment and, as usual, almost oblivious to the gulf between his good intentions and how his actions impact other people, he admits, “I’ve made some empty promises in my life, but hands down, that was the most generous.” It’s like watching a toddler squish a bird in its hands while trying to “save” it.

10. Kendall Roy (Jeremy Strong) in Succession Season 1-4

We have to sit back in admiration at this creation, because where do we even begin? Billionaire Dad Logan Roy (Brian Cox) deliberately set his children at each other’s throats to watch them fight for his approval, and it has become his oldest son Kendall’s entire personality. Overeager yet underqualified to assert his expertise in all encounters, Kendall dials up the cringe until the knob breaks when he patronises a startup company who’re pitching an art venture to him during Season 1. If you survive that, you can watch him rap “L to the OG” in Season 2. But whatever you do, don’t go into his stakeholder meeting in Season 4, episode 6, without building up your Kendall tolerance first. Seeing Kendall “emotionally” chatting to a video of his dad in an effort to shill the new streaming service Living+ will finish off an unprepared viewer. You are not strong enough. 

Need more rehearsal time? One fan has suggested listening to an especially cringey show before you watch what’s actually happening on screen – as if it’s an eclipse that’s going to burn your eyes if you look directly at it. 

Binge The Rehearsal Season 1-2 on Showmax now.