The second season of “The Rehearsal,” Nathan Fielder’s ambitious exercise in comic social experimentation, ended on Sunday on HBO. It focused on one topic — air safety — but did so with an astounding array of props and stunts, including replica airport terminals, cloned dogs, a fake singing contest and enormous, breastfeeding puppets. James Poniewozik, chief TV critic for The Times, and Alissa Wilkinson, a Times movie critic, discussed all of the above and more.
Spoilers and some simulations of Fielder’s simulations follow.
JAMES PONIEWOZIK Alissa, the last time we convened to discuss a Nathan Fielder project, “The Curse,” it ended with his jaw-dropping ascent into the air. Today we’re talking Season 2 of “The Rehearsal” and I will not bury the lead: Our boy flew a damn passenger jet.
I will say that the ending, which reveals that Fielder has been moonlighting as a commercial jet pilot, caught me by surprise (though not eagle-eyed Redditors, who noted weeks ago that Fielder had obtained a commercial pilot’s license). It also assuaged my worries that this audacious premise would fizzle out. The previews for this season suggested that it might build to Fielder bringing his ideas before a congressional subcommittee. Instead, that scene proved be a rehearsal, and the host only managed an awkward meeting with one actual representative, Steve Cohen of Tennessee.
Turned out there was nowhere to go from there but up. I don’t know if the final flight of “The Rehearsal” proved the thesis — essentially, that cringe comedy can save lives. But just as Season 1 was a striking exploration of how to live with doubt and regret, Season 2’s high-concept stunts, and its combination of social commentary and personal (quasi) revelation, suggest that what might have been a one-off is in fact a spectacularly repeatable format.
How well did it work for you? Please be Blunt. I’m Allears.
ALISSA WILKINSON Co-pilot Blunt here, clocking in for duty. Or whatever pilots say.
That finale was wild. Something I deeply love about this series is my inability, at almost any moment, to know whether something I am watching is “real” or not. The congressional hearing, as you noted, is a rehearsal, but by the time we got to that point in that episode I would have believed almost anything. I actually had to Google whether Fielder had in fact worked on “Canadian Idol.” (He did.)
But what is reality, anyhow, am I right? [Stares into the middle distance for a moment.] I mean, who is Nathan Fielder? The version of him on the show is not the “real” guy, sure — he’s playing a version of himself — which means those revelations aren’t necessarily “real” either. On the other hand, everyone appearing in nonfiction footage is, on some level, performing as a character. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, narrating his own story in his memoir, the basis of the third episode, is constructing a character. Those people who tell Fielder they don’t have any feelings about their partner canoodling with another actor: They’re playing a character. The people auditioning for “Wings of Voice,” the show’s fake singing competition, are definitely playing characters. Everyone is performing as a character, full stop.
As a result of all the existential dithering built into the concept of the show, I didn’t know until the end that Fielder had really flown the jet — maybe this, too, was an elaborate setup. The bottomless pile of HBO money that he kept touting throughout the preceding episodes made me really wonder. (I’m still about 2 percent uncertain.) But at least as far as the season is concerned, he really, uh, landed the plane.
Until the finale, I wasn’t quite as certain that this season was as coherent as the previous one. I think that last episode managed to pull it all together with dizzying deftness. But I’m curious: What do you think it all means?
PONIEWOZIK Whether XYZ “really happened” in “The Rehearsal” is something I can’t know, nor do I especially care — any more than I do in a “based on a true story” series like “Baby Reindeer.”
But the season was about something very real — deadly air disasters and the human dynamics that might contribute to them. I don’t know how aviation experts would judge Fielder’s diagnoses or his methods. (Though he notes that training to fly a passenger jet involves “the ultimate rehearsal,” in an enormous, Fielderian simulator.) But I could not avoid thinking of the show when I read an analysis of January’s fatal midair collision in Washington, D.C., which looked at — among other factors — the communication between the helicopter pilot and co-pilot.
I’m not actually sure that the climactic voyage, though gobsmacking, did more to prove Fielder’s real-world point than the season had already. That’s fine; I do not need Nathan Fielder to end air-travel fatalities in six episodes of TV. What the season did argue, in its strange, hilarious way, was that the human desire to avoid discomfort is narcotically powerful, even dangerous.
This focus on avoidance is where the personal story line — and boy, we need to get into this — connects, I think. The final episodes take a turn, as Fielder (all together: or at least his character!) faces the suggestion that he might be neurodivergent. (He notes that “The Rehearsal” has resonated with people on the spectrum, and he has said he’s researched Asperger’s syndrome as part of his work.) In the end, he chooses not to pursue an answer, continues flying and concludes that if you’re in the cockpit, “you must be fine.”
It’s an old move of Fielder’s going back to “Nathan for You,” to portray his character as having blind spots as much as his subjects do. But I don’t think he’s ever done it quite so poignantly. After undertaking a yearslong project on the lure of denial, he still can’t listen to his internal co-pilot.
WILKINSON From the very start of the show, I found myself thinking it was sort of a dramatization, or maybe unpacking, of two mental experiences that can be unsettling. One is dissociation, the feeling that everything around you is unreal, and you’re disconnected from it. The other is Asperger’s, which for some can manifest as the feeling of always observing the world rather than being part of it.
The “rehearsal” impulse seems like a literalist way to cope with those sensations: replaying and trying out social situations in the hopes of navigating them properly. But it has also felt like a way for Fielder — or his character, anyhow — to actually have “normal” experiences that seem mysterious and out of reach. The funniest part of the finale for me is when he notes that his flight instructors say he was the worst student they’d ever had, and that they made him log many more hours in the cockpit than usual before he was allowed to get in the air. Even here, he has to practice and practice and practice.
Once he’s in the air, though, he is at peace. He’s literally up above it all, looking down and observing. Obviously you and I both were thinking about “The Curse” here, but that’s got to be on purpose, right? There’s an element in both shows of grasping so tightly to social experience down on earth and then, up in the air, finding a kind of serenity, a place where the confusing social demands that Fielder experiences evaporate for a while.
That’s why the very ending, with Fielder refusing to answer his doctor’s phone call and instead watching the singer from his fake reality show belting out Evanescence’s “Bring Me to Life,” the song from Sullenberger’s memoir, was really quite poignant. The arc of this season has Fielder being “reborn” as a weird little baby and trying to live someone else’s life to get inside his head, then exploring romance and trying to discern why people do what they do in love. He is kind of doing an interpretive dance to the lyrics of the Evanescence hit (“Breathe into me and make me real / Bring me to life”), in the form of a very expensive TV extravaganza.
To borrow from an internet meme: Men will literally learn to pilot a jet and make an HBO show rather than go to therapy?
PONIEWOZIK What do people ask when there’s an airplane disaster? “Did they find the black box?” The flight recorder — it is actually orange — is the impregnable device designed to survive a crash. Crack it open, reveal its secrets, and you might understand what happened and why. This terrible thing might at least make sense.
To Fielder’s “Rehearsal” persona, all human behavior is a black box. This challenges him, in personal interactions, in performing magic, even in acting on “The Curse.” But it also, maybe, advantages him. If every human interaction has to be unpacked, decoded, replicated to be understood, perhaps you can notice dynamics that others might overlook.
One thing the second season has in common with the first is the question, as I wrote in my Season 1 review: “Is it ever possible to truly understand another person?” This is the project of Episode 3, maybe the most magnificently batty and hilarious thing I will see on TV all year, in which Fielder speed-runs Sullenberger’s life. Recall that in Season 1, he time-lapsed the raising of a child; here, he one-ups himself by becoming the child. I don’t think any of us will forget seeing a shaven Fielder gulp milk gushing from the breast of a “mother” puppet the size of a “Game of Thrones” giant.
But there’s more to the episode than shock comedy. It’s an attempt to understand the most intangible experiences: maternal love, romantic lust and the love of music, which, after all, is no more than waves on the air. Seeing baby Nathan’s colossal mother lumber into his nursery felt like getting a glimpse of the Punch-and-Judy show of human life as seen through his eyes. This perspective may make him an outsider, but it might also be what makes him such an effective puppeteer.
WILKINSON This reminds me, immodestly, of what I wrote about the show after the first season’s finale aired. I think it’s the rare TV show that consciously tries to make viewers aware of and uncomfortable with their own positioning as audience members, in a way that often is reserved for weird experimental documentaries. We’re used to objectifying characters onscreen, to assuming we know who they are and how they tick from a few lines of expository dialogue and character-creating details, something the first season actively, textually confronts. “Our reactions” to the show, I wrote, “whatever they are, can be an excellent reminder that we know much less about others than we think we do.”
I’m struck by how much that’s a theme in this second season, too. The raw vulnerability of the auditions for “Wings of Voice,” the censorship saga with Paramount+, the creepy multiroom set in which we can watch five (fake) couples get it on and contemplate what actors do, the eruption of squicked-out reactions after baby Nathan breastfeeds — they’re all designed to make viewers aware of being participants in the whole entertainment thing. That makes us notice our feelings. Which seems like something Fielder isn’t all that comfortable with, and thus what he’s most interested in.
Empathy is probably best defined as the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. Actors tend to understand it well, precisely because they inhabit that black box through rehearsal. But it’s hard to empathize with an object you’ve reduced to inputs and outputs. It seems like Fielder (or, well, “Fielder”) is probing that here.
PONIEWOZIK “The Rehearsal” inspires a lot of big thoughts, Alissa, but we shouldn’t overlook how remarkable it is as a production. There was so much stuff packed into one six-episode season! I mean, the Sully episode itself also had Fielder curating the life experiences of a cloned dog so that it would have the same personality as its forebear. There was a reality show! A replica airport! And, I reiterate, he flew a whole jet plane!
To what end? I think a lot about A.I. these days. Who doesn’t, right? And A.I. models — apologies to actual tech experts for this thumbnail description — operate on the principle that if you throw enough resources at enough data, you can create a simulacrum of anything, even, ultimately, the mind.
What is “The Rehearsal” if not man-made artificial intelligence? It is a D.I.Y., analog effort to do what A.I. does, to run through simulations and permutations to achieve a workable approximation of reality. It is a monumental act of faith that one person — at least, one with a writing and production staff and HBO’s budget — can do the math on all the variables of the cosmos. It’s Borgesian, all these 1:1 scale maps of human experience, this belief that one dedicated, obsessed person can master all the butterfly-wing currents of circumstance.
Nathan Fielder may be a very weird person. But in this respect, “The Rehearsal” might be the most human show on TV.
WILKINSON You’re so right — I mean, Fielder stealth-promoted the show by actually bartending for a bit at the real Alligator Lounge in Brooklyn (which, before this show, was best known as the place that gives you an entire free pizza when you order a beer!). If there’s a more human-connection place than a bar, I don’t know what it is.
And honestly, a show like “The Rehearsal” is one of the reasons I know that A.I., no matter its future capabilities as a writer some day, is just not going to be as good as a great (or even pretty good) artist. The mark of great art, for me, is that it invites the audience into an exploration of something they’ve never thought about before. At this juncture, A.I., by definition, works with what’s been previously done. There is next to nothing about “The Rehearsal” that feels like some other show I’ve seen before. I can barely fathom how Fielder came up with it. I have no idea how, if it’s renewed, he’ll come up with a third season.
But that’s what I said last time.
Photos and video via HBO.
Produced by Tala Safie
James Poniewozik is the chief TV critic for The Times. He writes reviews and essays with an emphasis on television as it reflects a changing culture and politics.
Alissa Wilkinson is a Times movie critic. She’s been writing about movies since 2005.
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