HBO Confirms That Its Best TV Show Is Officially Coming Back in 2025

It has been more than two years since one of HBO’s best shows debuted and was quickly given a second season renewal, but the long wait for those new episodes is almost over. HBO has confirmed that Nathan Fielder’s docu-comedy series The Rehearsal will return for its eagerly anticipated Season 2 in 2025. A specific premiere date has not yet been announced, but the confirmation of the show’s return next year came in a sizzle reel that aired ahead of The Penguin’s season finale Sunday night and has since been shared online as well. The video also included updates on a handful of other HBO series including The White Lotus Season 3, The Righteous Gemstones Season 4, and Peacemaker Season 2. You can check it all out for yourself in the video below.

Created, written, directed by, and starring Nathan Fielder, The Rehearsal features Fielder helping ordinary people rehearse for difficult and complicated conversations or major life events by using sets and actors to recreate the situations. The sets and scenarios are carefully crafted, complete with the practice of different dialogue or conversation trees to anticipate every possible outcome and prepare accordingly for every variable. The series was, to an extent, developed out of Fielder’s series Nathan for You which saw Fielder and his team roleplaying scenarios to predict how people would respond as part of the preparation for that series. The Rehearsal, in essence, takes this idea to a much larger and much grander level and accordingly has some interesting results.

While The Rehearsal received major critical acclaim and praise with some even declaring it one of the best series of 2022, the series wasn’t without controversy. Some felt that the series was exploitative and at times cruel, with others calling into question the series’ ethics going so far as to question whether it truly is satirical as some critics asserted. When announcing Season 2 of The Rehearsal, HBO’s Amy Gravitt even referenced the “lively conversation” around the series.

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“Nathan has sparked such a lively conversation with The Rehearsal,” Gravitt shared in 2022. “We have no idea where Season 2 will take us, and that is the delight of this boundary-pushing show forma truly singular talent.”

What Will Season 2 of The Rehearsal Be About?

As for what the second season of The Rehearsal will be about, that is almost anyone’s guess. A poster announcing the show’s Season 2 renewal — released back in 2022 — showed Fielder on the set of a bedroom with a woman sitting on the couch behind him. The tagline on the poster was “one more chance to get it right”, prompting fans to think that the second season will continue the first — specifically Angela’s story, which saw Angela considering motherhood and Nathan standing in as her co-parent. That experiment didn’t go exactly as planned. That said, part of what makes The Rehearsal work so well from an audience perspective is that we don’t know going into it exactly what to expect. While the premise of the series is to rehearse every single detail and variable, it’s the unexpected nature of who it all plays out for the audience that is part of the magic. To that end, we may not get any real details about Season 2 until the season actually arrives sometime next year.

Season 1 of The Rehearsal is streaming on Max. Season 2 is set to arrive sometime in 2025.