Dear Nathan,
My name is Francisco Villar. I am an Argentine philosopher and a university professor.
First of all, I wanted to thank you for the second season of The Rehearsal. It exceeded all my expectations by far.
It might seem like I am writing to flatter you, but that is not the purpose of this letter. I simply felt the need to share with you some of the thoughts your show stirred up in me, born of its provocative philosophical and political depth.
I will limit my analysis to two side references that lingered with me while watching both seasons: The Possible and the Real, by the French philosopher Henri Bergson, and Letter to the Children of Jason, by the Athenian master of eloquence Isocrates.
While still in dialogue with both, I also aim to challenge their assumptions and explore certain speculative temptations your project awakened in me.
But I would rather not rush ahead without first pausing to reflect on what your series has to teach.
Through sheer repetition, your experiment ends up revealing a decisive truth to the viewer: every simulation is doomed to fail as a total anticipation. The limit, as you well know, is neither physical nor budgetary. The set could be reproduced with a level of fidelity indistinguishable by the senses. And yet, between preparation and reality, an unbridgeable temporal gap remains; each rehearsal opens toward the future as a deferred inner experience.
Bergson conceptualizes this irreducible feature of time —the impossibility of representing it without loss— as ‘duration’ (durée): consciousness flows in succession; it does not unfold like a board or a tablecloth laid out in simultaneity. Even if the replica of the Alligator Lounge transports Kor to the place of the encounter, his mental states do not repeat: he is not the same man in each rehearsal, nor on the day of the confession.
If the recreated environments are never truly identical —and moving through them requires an openness to difference— then duration, in a similar way, demands a deliberate act of imposture, a fictional pact. Angela’s practice fails when she forgets that she is not trying out how to be a part-time mother, that she cannot confine that role to the time when you are watching her.
It is possible, Nathan, that these reflections are a bit too heavy for a fan mail. Since I do not intend to turn this into an endless theoretical display, I will move on to the second learned reference I wanted to share with you.
Isocrates addresses the sons of the tyrant Jason of Pherae around 370 BCE, after their father’s death. Needless to say, the letter is a carefully crafted literary construction. It has come down to our time incomplete —in my view, not by accident, but because its author deemed it necessary: it was enough for him to sketch the gesture of a sapiential proem, a prelude without a body, unabashedly devoted to the love of invention.
The letter proposes a less anxious understanding of foresight (prónoia): an antidote to that obsession with control your show elevates to method. Projecting oneself into the future is not about predicting the contingent outcomes of our actions, but about lucidly deciding who we want to be with the time we have left. It means drawing the soul —like a bow— toward a vital hypothesis, and directing each daily task, as far as possible, toward that envisioned target.
By drawing a parallel between life and text, Isocrates invites us to approach each thing we do as the calibrated design of an organic whole and its proper parts. For someone like you —who has composed the rhythm of every scene, in seasons that sustain a conscious breath, with episodes that move at their own pace— this reflection will not go unnoticed.
Though perhaps all of this might sound a bit too abstract to you, Nathan.
In fact, what strikes me most is the bodily texture with which you inhabit the practice of documenting yourself while performing such an uncomfortable form of comedy. There is something in your approach that evokes an unpretentious analog nostalgia. It is probably no coincidence that the first season was produced in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Even if you say people often find you cold or awkward, there is a genuine need for intimacy and closeness written into your features: Kor, Angela, Adam and Remy, the copilots, Achilles, Colin… You look at your creations with the fond expression of a father watching over his offspring.
Screens, in your hands, do not divide: they monitor, script, assist. You want to smell and taste your actors —whether of the first or second order. Your humor spills out of electronic devices and becomes shop, merch, gesture —something we can touch.
My sensitivity, by contrast, leans more toward the virtual in its coded and digital form. My imagination was forged in the realm of video games: tiny vast capsules of trial and error.
If I were in your position, my impulse would be to burn through other people’s money on software and hardware of pathological implausibility —dreaming, like some Silicon Valley psychopath, that element 14 might replace carbon as the matter of simulation; that searing and inhuman heat might radiate from the cold calculations of processors pushed to their infernal limits.
What you carry out among humans and props, I would turn into an open-world exploration with carefully managed saved games and curated missions —just one technical step beyond the path already traced by the Fielder method: a playful immersion into programmable, virtual mock-ups of reality.
It feels almost natural for me to think I am the character in some colossal computational orchestration, and that my creator —whoever they may be— is watching me now, as I write (and erase, rewrite, and erase again) this message, with the same intensity you devote —MacBook strapped to your chest— to every twitch and wince of your experimental subjects.
Or maybe I’m just an extra in the indifferent drama of some galaxy cluster, or of a single, minuscule particle, dressed in hyperreal decor by a bored demiurge already sick of eternity.
Luckily, I have no contacts at HBO or with any production company.
My version of The Rehearsal would be a dreadful piece of dystopian sci-fi kitsch, a minor parody of Black Mirror or John Carpenter, or a grimoire by Nick Land —something that would amuse the cynics but unsettle my partner, my psychiatrist, and my mum.
Against these feverish, silicon-fueled dystopias, it felt like a slap in the face to discover that, at the heart of the second season, you had crafted a kind of fan fiction around the memories of a flesh-and-blood airline pilot.
By ironically embodying and expanding the world pulsing within Sully’s narrative, you connect with humanity in a way that is as profound as it is singular.
If there is a third season, I hope we keep seeing (or not!) the same candid Nathan, who learns through the laughter of your cast, with something of a childlike wonder, that life is play, and rehearsal is the highest form of freedom.
Warm regards,
Francisco
Note for the uninitiated reader:
This letter was originally written in Spanish and published on this same Substack two months ago (read it here). This exercise in rewriting was born from the desire to share my reflections with Nathan and his worldwide audience in their own language. It is neither better nor worse —and certainly not the same. I enjoyed both rehearsals equally.
I thank Melody Dubiansky —once my Ancient Greek student, later my English teacher— for her help with the final editing of the English manuscript.
The reading experience improves considerably if you have seen at least the first season of The Rehearsal. If you have not done so yet, do yourself a favor.
