For as long as I have been a fan of Nathan Fielder, I have also been a Nathan Fielder skeptic. His complete mastery of deadpan, deeply uncomfortable humour, which relies just as much on the “character” he plays as the bizarre situations he manufactures for the real people who appear on his shows, walks such a fine line that, inevitably, there are times when he trips right over it.
The first season of The Rehearsal, released in 2022, was an excruciating example of this, combining some of the funniest faux-reality television ever put on screen (“It’s days like these I curse the Chinese for inventing gunpowder!”) with some uncomfortable truths about, of all things, child acting and the incessant quest for fame. I strongly believe that Season 1 of The Rehearsal went too far – something which Nathan Fielder grudgingly seems to admit during this year’s follow-up season – the show becoming, in its own convoluted way, guilty of a similar kind of exploitation as that which Fielder set out to criticise.
Happily, Fielder’s return to the world of The Rehearsal – following the phenomenal and criminally underseen The Curse, co-starring Emma Stone – sees him correcting for the mistakes of the past, here combining some incredibly daring choices with a more nuanced, sympathetic perspective on the human condition. Rather surprisingly, Fielder’s awareness of his own reputation forms a welcome throughline across this season, the show’s creator-writer-star transparently trying to do better by those around him.
More importantly, The Rehearsal Season 2 is one of the most extraordinary seasons of television ever created, at times hilarious, unbearably cringeworthy, and yet informed by a certain earnestness which is often lacking in modern comedy. It’s about airline safety, about humanity’s struggle to connect with one another, and also cloned dogs, and giant puppets… and so much more.
The setup for The Rehearsal is as follows: Nathan Fielder, the Vancouver-born comedian who cut his teeth on This Hour Has 22 Minutes (and who graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades), has been handed a big fat HBO budget in support of his latest quasi-reality TV experiment. Nominally, it’s a show where he helps people rehearse for moments big and small in their lives, hiring lookalike actors and meticulously recreating real-life environments in order to prepare. In the first season, that included recreating an entire bar – hilariously renamed “Nate’s Lizard Lounge” – to help out a guy who’s nervous about disclosing a shameful (if not particularly high-stakes) secret, long kept hidden from his friends at the local pub.
In the second season, “The Fielder Method” is deployed to altogether different effect, Fielder tackling a wholly unexpected subject matter which, we soon learn, is near and dear to his heart: airline safety, and the prevalence of communications breakdowns between pilots when lives are on the line.
In practice, this amounts to a mind-bogglingly complicated series of social experiments, ranging from staged plane crashes in a flight simulator (with real pilots at the helm, some of whom will surely be getting calls from their employers), to Nathan Fielder deploying the considerable HBO budget to build a fake airport terminal on a soundstage, replete with crowded waiting areas, overpriced cafés, and shops stocked with mass-market paperbacks.
The season also finds time for a nature-versus-nurture experiment involving a trio of cloned dogs, bizarre giant puppets, and truly the strangest biopic of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger – of Miracle on the Hudson fame – ever cobbled together. It only gets weirder from there.
What The Rehearsal Season 2 also offers, however, is a fairly coherent, tongue only slightly in cheek, thesis about our collective inability to communicate. It’s something which “Nathan Fielder” (the character) and Nathan Fielder (the actor) has long struggled with, and which he genuinely sees as an endemic problem in the aviation industry.
The culture of piloting, which few of us have ever given any thought to, turns out to be about as problematic as any other male-dominated work environment, not least one in which co-pilots often meet for the first time onboard an aircraft, moments before takeoff. The solution, Fielder posits, is to run pilots through various rehearsal scenarios and play-acting exercises, giving them the tools they need to communicate clearly and confidently, so that the wrong choice isn’t made at 30,000 feet in the air.
Aviophobes will, understandably, need to give this one a pass, given what it reveals – and in other cases only hints at – about this industry, where even talking about, well, talking, is strictly taboo. That said, it’s reassuring (as Fielder is quick to point out) that the incidence of airplane accidents, let alone fatal accidents, has drastically diminished since the heyday of crashes in the 1970s. It’s not, Fielder stresses, that communications breakdown is the sole cause of avoidable crashes, but rather that it’s a significant contributing factor, one that’s long gone overlooked and under-discussed. In a work culture where mental health is not talked about, and where even a hint of anxiety, as Fielder brutally demonstrates in a later episode, is guaranteed to get a pilot grounded, the “Fielder Method” is here to suggest there’s another way.
The various and sundry detours Fielder takes are all, in their own way, very funny, expertly tiptoeing along the very line The Rehearsal crashed through last season. His participants – subjects might be the better word – are run through a strange gauntlet of exercises at once hilarious, discomfiting, and mostly well-intentioned. (At one point, Fielder explains to a congressional leader that the silliness is itself partly the point, since it helps break tension.)
Part of the fun comes from seeing what absurd scenarios people will subject themselves to when they know a camera is running. Another part is seeing the kind of people who willingly sign up for this stuff, Fielder (or his producers) demonstrating yet again their impressive knack for casting an eclectic mix of sympathetic, weird, and plain awful people who are more than happy to expose their true selves for our entertainment.
You may have heard that Fielder, a former junior producer on Canadian Idol, created a fictional singing competition as an extravagantly silly method to test the mettle of the (real) pilots who serve as the competition’s judges. You may have also heard that some participants felt hoodwinked about this “fake” contest, though it’s worth noting that Fielder is at pains to actually follow through on the ridiculously named Wings of Voice, which has a real winner who will, presumably, be leveraging her newfound fame. (In another funny recurring bit, the Wings of Voice contestants are all restricted to performing public domain songs, “to save HBO money”.)
The season’s standout episode (other than the finale, of which more in a moment) is Fielder’s out-of-left-field confrontation with his former producers at Paramount Television. Fans of Fielder’s earlier series, Nathan For You, will recall how he once created a “spite brand” of outdoor apparel, which focuses on Holocaust education as a counterpoint to a clothing company which, in a phrase I can’t believe I’m writing, once endorsed a Holocaust denier. (I realise this sounds like an elaborate joke, but I promise, to paraphrase Fielder, yes, this is real.)
This season of The Rehearsal sees Fielder unhappily forced to revisit this moment, after it’s revealed that Paramount+ Germany has delisted the episode, out of an overabundance of caution (one might say, fear) about vaguely defined “sensitivities”. Fielder, who is Jewish, is not the type to let this slide, using his new series to call out Paramount+ for suppressing Jewish stories in the most forceful – and uniquely Fielderian – fashion imaginable. If you watch nothing else from The Rehearsal, you should watch these back-to-back clips, in which Fielder’s sincere commitment to a noble cause inspires a ferociously angry comic bit about the “ideology” of Paramount+ Germany.
All the while, The Rehearsal finds time for this season’s wildly unexpected subplot, which involves “Nathan” (and Nathan) grappling with his newfound fame amongst the autism community, which sees in his awkward, vexed communication style a mirror to their own experience. Whether or not “Nathan” (or Nathan) is actually autistic becomes a well-meaning running joke, Fielder careful only to punch up (at people who misunderstand or try to “fix” autism) and never down (the star demonstrating an obvious affinity for his autistic fanbase). In one of the season’s lovelier moments, which also serves as a callback to the controversy over Season 1, Fielder invites a group of autistic children to his fake airport, in an exercise intended to habituate them to the challenges of air travel. (Frankly, I feel like we could all benefit.)
And then there’s The Rehearsal’s sublime season 2 finale, which, if it hasn’t already been spoiled for you, really should be seen in context before reading any further.
[Mega-Spoilers Follow]
In the Season 2 finale of The Rehearsal, Fielder’s outsized commitment to his latest cause reaches its zenith when, in a stunt sure to impress even Tom Cruise, Fielder reveals that he’s actually been a certified pilot the whole time, having devoted the hundreds of required hours to earn his licence in the years since Season 1. (A development which, incidentally, surely helps explain The Curse’s sky-high finale.)
This, all with a mind to pull off his greatest feat yet: exploiting a loophole in the aviation safety rules so he can pilot a real Boeing 737 Jet, filled with real passengers (well, paid extras), accompanied by a real (mercifully, non-actor) copilot. As Fielder deadpans, in perhaps the single funniest line of his entire career, he is now “the least experienced person licensed to fly a 737 in North America.”
Is it a hoax, just another Fielder bit, or does Nathan Fielder actually fly a Boeing 737? The answer is a definitive yes, the show capturing some impressive (and mildly terrifying) aerial footage of the comedian sitting in the cockpit, alongside surely the most uncomfortable copilot of all time. (Fans have also tracked down Fielder’s publicly available pilot’s licence, for what it’s worth.)
It’s all in service of Fielder’s thesis that discomfort in the cockpit can and should be acknowledged, then overcome through the same kind of role playing exercises he’s been dabbling in all season. The point, Fielder explains, is to make his copilot uncomfortable, then work with him to unpack that discomfort and strengthen the relationship, to the benefit of the hundreds of passengers relying upon them. (Yes, Fielder lands the plane, to much applause both on-screen and, if you’re anything like us, from the living rooms of those watching at home.)
This being Fielder, it would be impossible to let things end on as earnest a note as that, and so we’re left with a postscript where, in a sly rug pull, Nathan Fielder reveals his second, hidden thesis.
As Fielder discusses his more recent side hustle flying disused 737s across continents (yes, really), he revisits the question of mental health in the aviation community, recalling the challenges faced by pilots who cannot admit even the slightest stress (let alone autism diagnosis), lest their career be torpedoed. Sitting in the cockpit, having deftly avoided the lingering question of his own mental health all season, he intones the following:
“They only let the smartest and best people fly a plane of this size, and it feels good to know that. No one is allowed in the cockpit if there’s something wrong with them.
So, if you’re here, you must be fine.”
So says the comedian who has just exploited a safety loophole so he could fly a Boeing 737, after completing less than half the required hours of training. If it wasn’t so sad, I would laugh. If it wasn’t so funny, I would cry.
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The Rehearsal Season 2 is streaming now on Crave in Canada.
