What The Rehearsal can teach us about essay structure

A not at all timely consideration of craft

What The Rehearsal Can Teach Us About Essay Structure

There’s a Rachel Kushner essay—”The Sinking of the HMS Bounty”— which I return to often when I’m trying to decide if an essay I’m writing is meandering in the right way. The essay begins with with the author visiting the site of the Munich Olympic bombing and ends with the downfall of a disgraced Doge of Venice, and somewhere in the middle there’s some stuff about boats. I love it, and yet there is only the most twisted of threads holding it all together: an argument that failures are always what we remember best.

I was thinking about this essay often while watching season two of The Rehearsal—a show that in its own ways likes to twist and turn on the thinnest ice of a theme. And as I thought about it more, The Rehearsal may be one of the most accessible lessons in structuring a piece of creative nonfiction. Some things we can learn from season two:

Commit to a theme

You can’t argue that Nathan Fielder can’t riff on a theme. Season two took the concept of rehearsals to an entirely new dimension—commercial flight safety—while staying true to the original premise. Similarly, you can get away with a lot of structural experimentation as long as you never lose connection to the theme. Whereas the theme of Kushner’s essay reveals itself slowly over time, and even after the first reading, the theme of The Rehearsal is never out of sight, even as Fielder hire’s actors to help a socially awkward co-pilot get his dating wings, or tries to angle his way into a congressional committee meeting or takes an autism test just to be sure. The more we Zoom out and pivot, the more we see the theme repeat itself like an infinity mirror.

Find creative freedom in tangents

It can get boring to plug away at a large piece of work that all circles a single, unified theme. I wrote a memoir in essays instead of a memoir just so I could play with a lot of different themes instead of feeling the restriction to define an entire period of my life according to one interpretation of the events. But The Rehearsal shows you can feel free to follow your curiosity wherever it takes you. Really bop around if you want—as long as we’re having fun and you can ultimately tie back to the original premise.

Revel in the slow reveal

I’m sure I’m not the only one here who was on Bluesky or Reddit when a fan found a record of Fielder’s commercial pilot’s license and shared it widely. We could all sense the ending beats of the season then, but we couldn’t guess it. Fielder reveals his gambit so slowly that even going into the final episode knowing that this man is fulling licensed to fly a plane himself, we still never knew what was coming next. My favorite essays are also hard to anticipate or predict. You don’t want to feel the end coming or sense what the takeaway will be before it’s time. You want an ending to feel like an old marketing saw: a “familiar surprise” or a “Surprise and delight.”

Stick the landing

Pun only partially intended. You can get away with a lot if you can pull it all together at the end. And a strong resolution will make readers want to revisit an essay again and again, trying to re-experience the big payoff. My personal weakness as a writer is the abrupt ending—wrapping things up prematurely because I’m leaving too much to the reader’s imagination. I tell myself it’s a style choice, but it’s usually just laziness. You have to invest early and often into your essay’s destination if you want it to hit. The Rehearsal’s season two finale has it all: a tense flight in a rented 747, a triumphant performance by the Wings of Voice winner just when you had almost forgotten about the competition, a now-iconic Evanescence needle drop, and a playful close-up of the mastermind’s eyes. It would be chaos if it hadn’t been perfectly set up across six wild episodes.

Are there any TV shows you draw inspiration from as a writer?