Nothing Can Prepare You for The Rehearsal‘s Second Season
Photo by John P. Johnson, courtesy of HBO
At one point in The Rehearsal’s second season, as Nathan Fielder addresses a government hearing about aviation safety, a member of Congress asks why a comedian known for “pranks” suddenly cares about preventing plane crashes. This is The Rehearsal, though, so this entire set up is one of Fielder’s “pranks.” It’s not a real hearing or a real member of Congress; it’s a “rehearsal” for a potential one that Fielder hopes to testify at. It’s just one of the many facades Fielder constructs across these six episodes, stacking and cross-cutting between them to the point where the line between truth and fiction isn’t just blurred but totally obliterated.
The second season of The Rehearsal rests on one underlying hypothesis: that one of the major causes of aviation disasters comes down to communication problems between pilots. Fielder bases that on actual black box transcripts from real airplane crashes where first officers, who can be fired for disobeying the pilot in charge, were clearly reluctant to question their captains or take control of the aircraft. His theory gets support from John Goglia, who was a member of the National Transportation Safety Board for 10 years, and who recommended the FAA implement role playing exercises to improve communication between pilots. And what’s role playing other than a rehearsal?
Fielder repeatedly says that everything he does this season is focused on fixing that communication problem. If you’ve ever seen the first season of The Rehearsal, or Fielder’s Comedy Central show Nathan for You, you know that everything he does will be done in the most complicated, overwrought, and obtuse way possible. And with HBO’s money supporting him (as he mentions repeatedly throughout the season), he once again has the financial freedom to go to extreme lengths to “rehearse” possible solutions to this issue. Much of the season takes place in a partial recreation of the Houston airport, complete with a Brookstone store, a pilots-only lounge, and one of those “newstands” that hardly ever sell magazines or newspapers anymore. That budget also pays for a fake reality TV competition, a detailed (and completely ridiculous) recreation of a certain well-known figure’s first several decades of life, and at least 200 actors trained in “the Fielder Method,” playing pilots, crew members, passengers, and various other characters. The scale of it all, and the lengths Fielder will go to, are absurd and hilarious.
If you’ve seen his other shows, though, you also know that Fielder himself—or at least the version of himself that he’s turned into a TV character—is usually the real focus of the show, with his seeming inability to understand people and their emotions serving as a stand-in for humanity’s larger inability to understand each other. (If anything, using communication problems between pilots is almost too on the nose for Fielder.) That made the first season of The Rehearsal popular among those living with autism and neurodivergence—something that becomes a plot point in season two. How much Fielder’s unbreakable deadpan and difficulty connecting with others is based on his real personality or just affected for comedy is a foundational part of his whole deal, and one that might not ever be fully revealed. Honestly, it’s not particularly relevant to The Rehearsal; its weird kaleidoscope of reality and unreality would make for compelling, deeply funny TV even if Fielder was blatantly winking at us the whole time.
Structurally this is a very different season than the first. Fielder started that one with a one-off episode with a relatively small-scale rehearsal to get viewers used to the idea, and had a few similarly smaller and disconnected rehearsals throughout the season; everything is connected this season, though, even the parts that seem impossible to square with aviation. Season one largely focused on people instead of one overriding issue, with a multi-episode rehearsal of child-rearing that gave us one of 2022’s most unforgettable TV characters: Angela, the Christian conspiracist who believes the devil is deeply involved in our daily lives and who disappoints Fielder by ultimately not taking the rehearsal as seriously as he does. There is nobody as perversely fascinating as Angela in season two, and there’s not even really an opening for such a character to appear. The closest is a pilot who is such a parody of toxic masculinity that he seems too obviously scripted, admitting to behavior that anybody with any sense would never discuss, especially on TV; he appears briefly in only two episodes, though, and is never a central figure like Angela was.