The Rehearsal Season 2: Nathan Fielder is somewhat sincere

Nathan Fielder, creator of The Rehearsal, is not to be taken at face value. Grey haired and speaking in a slightly grim monotone, the creator and star of the genre-bending comedies Nathan for You and The Curse does not come across as one of the funniest people working in television.

Then again, the laughs he gets are just as likely to come from shock or incredulity as amusement. Even if you think you know what you’re going to get, you’re not ready for this.

Season 1 of The Rehearsal saw Fielder trying to help people through difficult situations via incredibly detailed rehearsals that invariably went off the rails, even as the show itself at times felt like it was the result of a scenario that didn’t pan out as planned.

Lines weren’t so much blurred as erased; at one stage, a scenario that involved Fielder acting as the father of young children had some viewers concerned that a child was getting emotionally involved for real (as in, outside the ‘reality’ of the show).

This season has Fielder focused on what seems to be an authentic and serious problem when it comes to airline safety: the difficulty co-pilots have in speaking up when they think the pilot has got it wrong.

Watch The Rehearsal Season 2 trailer.

The opening runs through a series of crashes where the co-pilot realised they were in trouble but was unable to get the pilot to course correct in time. If only there was a way to train those co-pilots in how to speak up in moments of crisis – if only they could practice via some kind of … rehearsal.

No sooner have the rules been laid down than events overtake them. Fielder’s schemes quickly tip over into the grandiose as he attempts to control every variable. Lurking in the background of numerous scenes, he takes on the vibe of a master manipulator, creating little boxes on a vast scale to trap people in and examine them. It rarely turns out well.

The Rehearsal: saving lives … kind of …

Early on Fielder mentions that his goal is to save lives and he has the money to do that – problem is that he’s been given the money on the condition he makes a comedy show. ‘We were over ten minutes into the episode, with zero laughs’. He’s selling himself short, but he’s also setting up the hall of mirrors the six episodes will stumble down.

We have to take him seriously for him to be funny; is having him silently standing in the corner of a hotel room while an airline pilot struggles to fold up an ironing board hilarious, or an essential part of a process to base a documentary on lived reality?

The real answer is that it’s both. We may not know what’s real and what’s staged, but we can know what makes us laugh. Talking to an airline’s media department early on, Fielder describes his mission as ‘We’re really trying to make a … somewhat sincere effort to explore and develop new ways to improve pilot communication in the cockpit’.

‘Somewhat sincere’ is what we’re meant to pick up on; the bigger joke comes later, and builds to something else entirely.

Seventy actors ‘trained in the Fielder method’ (as seen in Season 1) populating a fake airport is only part of it; the sheer scale of what Fielder is doing here is one of the many ways he keeps audiences off balance. When you can fake pretty much anything, how do we know what’s real?

At this scale, and with this many moving parts, reality can’t be held back. The rehearsal takes on a life of its own.

This is a series about trying to take control of reality through preparation and practice, only to have things still slip through your fingers. Raising the stakes to literal life and death makes sense; it also means a reoccurring moment at the start of the series is Fielder stalking through flames like a grim spectre of death while ‘dead’ pilots burn in plane crash wreckage (which is also pretty funny).

If all this seems scant on details, the whole point of The Rehearsal – well, one of many, as at time this seems to be operating on levels even Fielder himself may not be fully conscious of – is to be surprised at where things go. Which makes any kind of explainer or summary tricky.

Suffice to say, jaws will drop at some of what you’ll see; this journey to create safe landings is one wild ride.

The Rehearsal Season 2 premieres on Max on 21 April, with new episodes streaming weekly.

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