Nathan Fielder, the creator of the HBO comedy-documentary series “The Rehearsal,” extended his show’s commingling of performance and reality with a live appearance on CNN on Thursday.
Fielder went on “The Situation Room With Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown” to promote the second season of “The Rehearsal” (whose finale aired on Sunday), and to raise awareness about airline pilot safety. Fielder had been closely examining safety in the season, including the communication between pilots and co-pilots, which he argued is poor and is a key factor in many plane crashes.
In the finale, Fielder himself flew a Boeing 737 passenger jet with more than 100 actors on board in an attempt to simulate inter-pilot communication on real-world commercial flights.
On “The Situation Room,” he fired back at criticism from the Federal Aviation Administration, which said in a statement to CNN that it “isn’t seeing the data that supports the show’s central claim that pilot communications is to blame for airline disasters.”
“Well that’s dumb, they’re dumb,” Fielder said, sitting next to John Goglia, an aviation expert and former National Transportation Safety Board member who appeared as an adviser on “The Rehearsal” this season. Fielder criticized the F.A.A.’s training standards, which he said do not adequately prepare pilots and co-pilots to speak their mind if they have a concern.
“The training is someone shows you a PowerPoint slide saying ‘If you are a co-pilot and the pilot does something wrong, you need to speak up about it,’” he said. “That’s all. That’s the training.”
On Friday, the F.A.A. said in a statement that it “requires all airline crew members (pilots and flight attendants) and dispatchers to complete Crew Resource Management training,” which focuses on interactions among crew members.
“They must complete this training before they begin working in their official positions and complete it on a recurring basis afterward,” the F.A.A. said.
Over the course of six episodes, Fielder recruited several pilots to participate in elaborate role-playing scenarios that tested their ability to navigate sensitive conversations. In one episode, a pilot was encouraged to confront his girlfriend with suspicions of disloyalty while seated next to her in a mock cockpit. In another, several pilots were graded on their ability to deliver harsh feedback to contestants in a fake singing competition show.
Although the scenarios are contrived and frequently involve actors, the show also regularly depicts what appear to be genuine interactions with nonactors. The fifth episode featured an awkward interview with a congressman, Steve Cohen of Tennessee, a member of the aviation subcommittee. And Goglia’s appearances are played completely straight.
“It’s exploded,” Goglia said on “The Situation Room,” when asked about the public reaction to the show. “My emails exploded, my messages exploded, my grandkids were all over me — it’s unbelievable, the response.”
Reggie Ugwu is a Times culture reporter.
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