‘The Rehearsal’ Season 2 Shaping Up To Be Another Nathan Fielder Banger

Is it possible for a part-comedian, part-d5ocumentarian to solve the biggest cause of plane crashes across the world? When it’s Nathan Fielder asking that question, it’s possible that the answer is yes as he tackles aviation safety in the second of his show The Rehearsal.

Though he’s exceptionally gifted as a cringe comedian, Fielder has reinvented himself in recent years as one of the most interesting documentarians working today. His evolution from a business graduate (with really good grades) offering unconventional business advice to a man who illuminates both the realities and falsehoods of life has been gradual but nonetheless satisfying to track.

Season one of The Rehearsal is the most fascinating work of Fielder’s career so far, with the premise being that he helps normal people “rehearse” for terse social interactions. But as Nathan helps others, he and the people he’s supposedly helping find themselves unable to distinguish between reality and acting as he endlessly fixates on making life go perfectly to plan, rather than allowing it to be lived.

The shifting sights of The Rehearsal 

It’s not the sort of show that would be particularly conducive to a second season, and so Fielder shifted his sights in season two of The Rehearsal. Meeting with former National Transportation Safety Board officer John Goglia, Nathan says he’s been studying transcripts of doomed flights and concluded that the number one cause of crashes is poor communication due to the unequal relationship between pilot and first officer.

Goglia agrees, and Nathan sets out to use his HBO-funded resources to take a stab at improving the aviation industry. The only issue is that Nathan is painfully self-aware that he’s meant to be making a comedy series, and such extensive discussion about horrific plane crashes is pretty bleak.

Thus begins one of the first interesting threads of The Rehearsal season two: is it possible for a documentary/reality show to be both genuinely insightful and comedic? Fielder has more than proven that the answer is yes, but this time he’s not handling businesses or interpersonal relationships.

The balance is struck delicately in this episode thanks to the fact that “Nathan Fielder tries to improve plane safety” is a hilarious concept as is, but I’m intensely curious to see where this thread develops as the series continues.

Like with all of Fielder’s recent output, it’s easy to be dumbfounded by the amount of work on display here and the morally shaky foundations Nathan’s practices are built on. A majority of season two’s first episode sees Nathan meet Moody, a first officer for United Airlines who is willing to enter the weird world of The Rehearsal.

A jaw-dropping scale of production

In an attempt to find out as much as possible about Moody’s routine, Nathan recreates an entire airport terminal and hires countless efforts all trained in the Fielder Method, a fairly unethical acting strategy that involves unprecedented immersion in people’s lives. Some of the clips from the montage of actors preparing are pretty jaw-dropping in this episode.

As Nathan realises the issue is with pilots not communicating before they enter the cockpit, he aims to test Moody’s assertiveness by having an uncomfortable conversation first with other actors, and then his real-life girlfriend Cindy. Moody is insecure because their relationship is long distance and Cindy, as a Starbucks barista, could be getting hit on all the time at her job.

The solution? Get Moody and Cindy to have a deeply uncomfortable conversation in the cockpit while they’re both acting as pilots. This stretch of the season two premiere is deeply uncomfortable, as we watch a couple have a strange argument and Fielder uses the tension present in a real-life relationship for his own purposes.

Yet despite how strange this part of the episode is, it shows that both seasons of The Rehearsal are in conversation with one another. They ask us how much we actually understand about our fellow humans, and bring into question the very sincerity of reality/documentary TV itself. What is sincerity when the cameras are on? It looks like Nathan Fielder will once again be attempting to answer that question over the next five weeks, and I for one will be tuning in to listen.

The Rehearsal drops new episodes each week on Max.