The Rehearsal Season 2 Trailer: Nathan Fielder Tries to Protect Us from Air Disasters
Photo by John P. Johnson, courtesy of HBO
Nathan Fielder plays it close to the vest. The second season of his unclassifiable HBO series The Rehearsal premieres in just about two weeks, on April 20, and we’ve had no idea what it’s about—until today. And based on the first trailer, Fielder will be tackling an extremely timely subject, at least at some point during the show: airline disasters. You know, those things that seem to happen more frequently since Trump and Musk started dismantling the government earlier this year.
The trailer sets up what appears to be the new season’s main focus: Fielder using the resources of HBO to role-play various scenarios relating to aviation safety. That means recreations of a TSA security checkpoint, a mock-up of an airplane, awkward social mixers for pilots (or maybe actors hired to play pilots, and in what I’m pretty sure is the same recreated bar from the first season), and, ultimately, even a simulated plane crash—complete with stage-blood adorned extras flatly asking Fielder for help. At some point Fielder speaks at some kind of government hearing—or maybe it’s just a fake one that he’s role-playing for the day his character, always full of delusions of grandeur, assumes he’ll have to do that in real life.
The trailer doesn’t reference the first season’s main story, Fielder “raising” a child with a deeply weird woman whose level of performance will probably always remain a mystery. Of course the first season’s early trailers barely hinted at that direction, so who knows what season two will actually turn into; everything we see in this trailer could be pulled from the very first episode. It does seem to make it pretty clear that the Fielder character’s social awkwardness around women that he finds attractive—a recurring beat in Nathan for You—will continue, if the purposeful shots of Fielder talking to an obviously uncomfortable woman are any indication.