HBO produces excellent shows. This is news to nobody. Some of my favorite series I've ever watched have been HBO ones.

A friend just introduced me to HBO Max's newest comedy, The Rehearsal, which stars Nathan For You's Nathan Fielder.

Nathan expends absurdly overthinking, over-the-top effort to help real people prepare for big moments. He coaches them through rehearsing every single outcome so no spontaneous changes in the wind will catch them off-guard.

In the first episode, he preps an avid trivia-player to come clean with his trivia group that he's misrepresented having an advanced degree for 20 years. I don't want to ruin anything for you, but multiple building locations are built and field trips ensue to help set this first guy make peace with an internal conflict and settle an interpersonal problem.

That's the only episode of The Rehearsal as of this writing. The series having had only one adventure so far was the exact piece of information that got me to start watching it.

I'm not a binge-watcher - one of the weirdest knock-on effects of bipolar disorder is that watching TV for even a little bit too long throws me into uncomfortable mania.

I auto-reject TV series with years of back episodes to catch up on because I absolutely cannot spend all my nights and weekends slamming entry after entry if I don't want to get sick.

I've only seen a few episodes of Nathan For You (on Hulu), so I wasn't super-familiar with Nathan-comedy's flavor profile. The Rehearsal feels to me like a gentle, awkward blend of NFY and Joe Pera Talks with You's cringe-comedy, both hosted by a wistfully earnest, kind, hilarious dork.

If you're like me and like to start from the beginning of a series but hate the idea of playing catch-up watching TV for 12 hours straight, this is a good one to start fresh and have new episodes to look forward to every Friday.

The show is funny, suspenseful, makes you feel good, and has a lot of wild layers that go far beyond reasonable effort to help people get ready for their big moment.

Singing battle songs, settling up

HBO Max also has a Game of Thrones prequel series on the way next month.

The GoT years (2011-2019) were unusual in the age of streaming because everybody was watching it - every week was like the Super Bowl on Four Loko with all of us enthusing online and at the office about the shocking deaths, our favorite characters, and excited theories of what could happen next.

But three years after the finale, the once-immense hit GoT has more or less the lasting cultural impact of Avatar.

Can you name any characters in Avatar?

I can't!

As soon as we collectively decided that the GoT series wrap-up sucked shit, the conversation around the series screeched to a dead stop. The epic story became the embarrassing incident at the family reunion that we agreed never to speak of again.

There was an episode in Season 8 called A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms, the general idea of which was that all the major-arcana players that had survived to that dot on the map hung out chatting together in a dark castle for the entire night before the highest-stakes battle of the whole saga.

In this bottle episode, the characters stand still to have philosophical talks, make peace on longstanding conflicts, and drink/eat/rest/prepare/pray/worry together over what the following day would bring.

Everyone in the castle is settling up with themselves, each other, and the traditions that tie their hands together before the huge bloodbath in the morning between the good guys and the white-walker zombies.

Message in a bottle episode

About a week ago, I secured a full-time job offer at Comcast JUST as time ran out: when I got laid off, Comcast allowed me 60 days of continued employment to find a new internal position, and I got the offer on day 62 (they gave me a grace period due to having interviewed twice right before go time).

The job is doing some technical writing for Content & Streaming Providers, which sounds like cool subject matter, and I ostensibly know what I'm doing from being a tech writer for a long time. My first day is tomorrow.

This past week, I felt like one of the folks in the castle in the GoT episode - external onlookers know I'll be just fine because I'm the good guy; they assure me that of course I'll be ok.

But it can be hard to anticipate what'll happen to you when you're the one staring down your first day at a new school.

This is true even if you're like Brienne of Tarth and have cut down more than your share of scary bad guys.

Not only that, anyone who followed GoT for any amount of time knows that even the main characters can go down. That compelling surprisability was one of the main draws of the show.

Also, not very long ago, I started in very enthusiastically on some freelance work that I was very excited about, supporting someone I admire a great deal, for an organization that profoundly and continuously influences my life for the better.

But just as things were kicking off, I froze in place. The last few months have been way too much uncertainty and horrible surprises, and it all caught up to me on the same day.

I abruptly had to hit the pause button for that adventure almost immediately, which was a huge source of personal frustration and disappointment. But I want to make sure it kill it for this person and we can establish a sustainable system long-term, so I put a temporary hold on it until some items settle down and I can focus more of my brain on this collab.

Gearing up for the unknown, sans Nathan

This week I got busy doing the things those GoT characters did in the bottle episode: standing still to close out some issues that've been going on for years, having lengthy heart-to-heart talks about the future, resting, and my version of slamming ale and singing drunken songs around the castle fireplace (firing memes back and forth with my favorite meme-mongers and making my own unserious things).

I seriously doubt that the new job will be anything close to a harrowing medieval battle with dragons and final-boss undead bad guys.

In fact, yup, it'll almost definitely be not much to write home about.

My character name is a blue link in the wiki for the next episode, so there's no question I can double back to pick up important threads in the near future.

This brief window of time is about settling up with the last few months (and years), just like the folks in the castle before they took on something intimidating.

I'm wrapping up some outstanding, long-standing issues that are bothering me, strengthening some relationships and making peace with letting go of others, and connecting with my best buds for the deep sleepover talks I wrote to you about before.

I'm hoping by the time the GoT prequel premieres, events around me will have gone back to being reasonably boring so I can generate my own excitement and find the ability to concentrate on some freelance work instead of having the wind knocked out of me almost constantly by crazy fucking plot twists.

This past week likely wasn't the cliffhanger I imagined it to be. Feels like it, though.

If only Nathan was here to prepare me for every possible outcome! I would absolutely outsource this overthinking to him so he could exactly anticipate what's on the other side of this debut.

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