Watchable on Crave, FX, StackTV, Netflix July 11-17, 2022

SHOW OF THE WEEK: The Rehearsal (July 15, 11 p.m., HBO/Crave)

It struck me after watching all six episodes of “The Rehearsal” that an alternative title might be “A Fool’s Errand,” since the idea that variables in a life event can be controlled by repeated rehearsal of the event is inherently preposterous, which is clearly the point here.

But I suppose it also works if you think of Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder as a fool in the sense of a person employed by royalty or other aristocratic households to entertain.

In this case, HBO is the one paying the bills and I’m thinking they must have been enormous.

In the first episode, for instance, Fielder has an entire Brooklyn bar recreated in a studio in meticulous detail, right down to the balloon stuck in a corner of the ceiling. All this so that a man who’s been lying to his trivia teammates for years about the master’s degree he doesn’t have can rehearse coming clean to the teammate he thinks most likely to react badly to the lie.

Fielder also rehearses his own interactions with the subject, using a look-alike actor and a replica of the man’s apartment — secretly digitally mapped during a fake visit by the gas company.

It’s a staggering amount of preparation for something so relatively mundane, and the awkwardness between Nathan and his subject shows that the rehearsal hasn’t really done the trick.

Likewise, the real-life meeting between the man and his teammate doesn’t go as it did in the 13 rehearsals; I won’t spoil things by telling you how it turns out.

Nevertheless, Fielder persists and his next rehearsal is a doozy: a 44-year-old woman named Angela is considering whether she wants to have a baby. So Fielder moves her into a house in rural Oregon where she parents a fake child named Adam, who’s meant to grow from infant to 18 years over two months.

Adam, of course, is really a series of child actors. It’s a trip watching crew members quietly sneak a replacement baby through a window into a crib to conform to Oregon’s child labour laws while simultaneously maintaining the seamlessness of the illusion.

Touches like that emphasize the falsity of the whole endeavour. Crew members “plant” store-bought vegetables in the garden — Angela’s idea of playing house includes living off the land — and she maintains a fake business selling fake skin-care products that a fake mail carrier picks up to fake ship.

Fielder, meanwhile, manipulates his subjects every step of the way, not just the ordinary people he aims to help with these rehearsals, but the actors he’s hired to stage the scenarios.

The trivia player compares Fielder to Willy Wonka, an analogy that seems to disturb Fielder — or does it? It’s difficult to distinguish Nathan the person from Nathan the character, which I’m sure is by design.

Mind you, after he gets more deeply involved in the fake parenting rehearsal — the network has asked media not to reveal how — things seem to get very real.

There appears to be genuine conflict between Angela, who is aggressively Christian, and Nathan, who is Jewish, on the subject of religion. Nathan’s attempts to rehearse his way into a detente with Angela, with an actor playing her, get uncomfortably nasty.

And there are heartbreaking side effects on one of the youngsters playing Adam at age 6. Fielder seems genuinely stricken by the development. Are those real tears in his eyes when he visits the child and his mother? Or is it just another part of the spoof?

With Fielder, it’s hard to say. As he himself says, “How do you ever know you truly understand someone?” The short answer is that you don’t.

“The Rehearsal” is billed as a comedy but, like Fielder himself, the show’s true nature is hard to pin down. Poking through the absurdity is a sense of melancholy, that no matter what bridges we strive to build in life there will always be some detail we get wrong and real connection will elude us.

Short Takes

What We Do in the Shadows (July 12, 10 p.m., FX)

The TV world’s most entertainingly dysfunctional vampire household is back, but it’s not quite business as usual in Season 4 of the comedy. For one thing, their Staten Island house is falling apart given that Laszlo (Matt Berry) couldn’t be bothered to maintain it while Nadja (Natasia Demetriou) and Nandor (Kayvan Novak) were off on a year of adventures. (Look for cameos amid the decrepitude by one of Toronto’s better known creatures, the raccoon.) Laszlo was too busy raising the thing that crawled out of dead Colin Robinson’s chest at the end of last season — and props to the special effects crew for doing such a great job of putting Mark Proksch’s head on various child bodies. Guillermo (Harvey Guillen) is back as well, having survived two trans-Atlantic sea voyages in a crate with nothing but Oreos and Pedialyte for sustenance. But his plan to finally stop catering to the vampires is derailed when Nandor announces he’s getting married — to a yet unknown bride — and asks Guillermo to be his best man. And Nadja is determined to open a vampire nightclub in the vampiric council headquarters to the alarm of the Guide (Kristen Schaal). If you already love this incorrigible group of undead narcissists and their human caretaker, you’re in for more of what you love. And if you don’t, the seasons and episodes are short, so go ahead and catch up.

How to Change Your Mind (July 12, Netflix)

If I can shamelessly paraphrase American LSD proponent Timothy Leary, why not turn on, tune in and drop your preconceptions with this docuseries about psychedelic drugs? Based on the book by Michael Pollan, who also narrates the series, it considers the potential benefits of demonized substances like, yes, LSD, psilocybin (magic mushrooms), MDMA (ecstasy) and mescaline. In the 1950s, for instance, Pollan tells us there was much promising research into LSD and other psychedelics that got buried when the United States under Richard Nixon began its war on drugs, a destructive and counterproductive campaign that continues to this day. It was the Swiss who jumped back into LSD research more than three decades later and now the drug is being studied as a possible antidote to depression, anxiety and pain, while people in the U.S. are doing their own experimentation with microdosing. Pollan proposes that psychedelics offer a way to penetrate the mystery of consciousness itself. No one’s telling you to go out and drop acid — the show includes a disclaimer that it’s meant as entertainment not medical advice — but it offers at the very least a drug-free opportunity for some mind expansion.

Netflix also has the comedy special “Bill Burr: Live at Red Rocks” (July 12), the horror series “Resident Evil” (July 14) and the animated series “Kung Fu Panda: The Dragon Knight” (July 14). And while I hear the Jane Austen purists are up in arms over the new movie version of “Persuasion” (July 15), starring Dakota Johnson, this Austen devotee will reserve judgment until she’s seen it for herself.

Departure (July 13, 9 p.m., Global TV/StackTV)

Buckle up for another season of this fast-paced series in which a crew of intrepid investigators solve transportation accidents with all the intensity of a true crime drama. Last season it was a plane crash over the Atlantic; this season an automated high-speed train has derailed between Toronto and Chicago. Kendra Malley (Archie Panjabi, “The Good Wife”) once again leads the probe. Some of the plot devices are well worn, such as the suspicious FBI agent (Karen LeBlanc) who won’t share information, but you tend to get swept along with the speed of the show. Panjabi is still magnetic as Kendra, ably backed by senior investigators Dom (Kris Holden-Ried) and Theo (Mark Rendall). And ex-boss Howard (the magnificent Christopher Plummer) is still helping from the sidelines, although he’s only ever seen on phone calls, with Plummer shooting all his scenes at his home in Connecticut, completing them before his death in February 2021. Welcome newcomers to the cast include Kelly McCormack as a new investigator, Donal Logue as a helpful local sheriff and Irish actor Jason O’Mara as an FBI prisoner who escapes the crash.

Odds and Ends

I would have loved to get an advance look at the final episodes of “Better Call Saul,” but the fact I didn’t hasn’t diminished my enthusiasm for this masterful “Breaking Bad” spinoff, which concludes its sixth and final season beginning July 11 at 9 p.m. on AMC.

We “Bachelor” franchise fans are suckers for punishment, so of course we’ll watch “The Bachelorette” when Season 19 debuts July 11 at 8 p.m. on Citytv. One of the few good things to come out of the shit show that was Clayton Echard’s “Bachelor” season was the friendship between Gabby Windey and Rachel Recchia, who are sharing the season as dual Bachelorettes. With 32 suitors to start out with, it’s going to be a lot.

Fans of Canadian fabulousness will want to check out the Season 3 premiere of “Canada’s Drag Race” (July 14, 9 p.m., Crave). There are 12 new artists competing to be Canada’s Drag Superstar; Brooke Lynn Hytes, Traci Melchor and Brad Goreski are back as judges; and the guest judges include legends like Carole Pope, JIMBO and Vanessa Vanjie Mateo. Crave also has the documentary “Julia” (July 11, 9 p.m.) for those who want to check out the real Julia Child.

Finally, you can catch “Forever Summer: Hamptons” (July 15, Prime Video) if you want to watch rich kids and townies mixing it up on the beach in the exclusive Long Island vacation destination.

NOTE: The listings here are in Eastern Standard Time and I’ve verified the times where possible, but it’s always best to check listings for your own area. The selection of programs reviewed reflects what I’m given access to by networks and streamers, whether reviews are embargoed, how many shows I have time to watch and my own personal taste. The Odds and Ends section includes shows that I have not watched.