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There are two ideas at the core of The Rehearsal, the Nathan Fielder docu-comedy that returns for its second season this weekend on HBO. The first is the core theme of much of Fielder’s work, and particularly his Comedy Central series Nathan For You: Fielder’s never-ending quest to figure out why people don’t like him, and how to change it. The second is specific to this show: the absurd scale at which Fielder can tackle any problem, by virtue of having a seemingly limitless budget from his new pay-cable bosses.
Sometimes, the two concepts work in perfect harmony, creating a comedy that is as explosively funny as it is uncomfortable. At others, it’s hard not to lean into the worst fears of Fielder’s onscreen persona(*) and wish there was less of Nathan working through his own issues, and more of him spending HBO’s money in irresponsible ways.
(*) In the first episode, asked if The Rehearsal is a documentary, he replies, “I would use that term loosely.” Similarly, it seems fair to use the idea of Fielder being himselfon-camera loosely. At minimum, he’s playing an exaggerated version of himself, if not a wholly created character. In the hopes of clarity here, I’ll refer to the person who helps write and produce the show as Fielder, and the guy we see onscreen as Nathan — even though there are occasions where Nathan is more overtly acting as Fielder. See? Not confusing at all.
In the first season, Nathan realized that the best way to approach challenging moments in life is to practice them ahead of time. He began offering this service to others, staging role-playing scenarios in which actors portrayed one or more figures in a particular dilemma. When a man wanted to find a way to admit to his pub quiz teammate that he had lied about his academic credentials, for instance, Fielder not only hired an actor to play the teammate, but built a detailed recreation of the bar where their conversation would take place; later in that season, he moved the bar set across the country to Oregon, just so he could have a place to hang out to deal with his loneliness. To train actors for all of these rehearsals, he even set up his own acting school where he taught “the Fielder Method,” in which his students would learn to stalk and mimic their subjects; somehow, this led to one of the students applying this approach to Nathan himself, creating a “turtles all the way down” situation in which the number of faux-Nathans began to seem infinite.
The main arc of that season had Nathan helping a single, childless woman practice motherhood so that she could decide if she wanted to have a baby. This eventually led to Nathan joining the exercise, and then taking over altogether as a single dad once the woman understandably began to feel like the exercise was no longer about her. In the divisive season finale, it appeared that Fielder had inadvertently caused emotional damage to one of the child actors from the exercise, who began to take the idea of Nathan as his surrogate father too seriously.
Three years later, Nathan has a much bigger problem to solve: commercial airplane crashes. As he explains to former NTSB board member John Goglia early in the Season Two premiere, he has obsessively combed over flight logs from various crashes over the years, and concluded that many of them are the result of poor communication between the flight crew — specifically, that many co-pilots feel reluctant to speak up when they disagree with their captain’s approach in dangerous situations.
“Even though I had the resources to potentially solve this life-or-death issue and save real humans from dying,” he acknowledges in his voiceover narration, “I was given this money to create a comedy series.”
This is in many ways even trickier territory than anything The Rehearsal dealt with last season, including the matter of whether or not Fielder emotionally damaged a small child(*). This was all done well before the recent spate of crashes — eventually, we see that the seeds of this project go back about three years, practically to the start of the hiatus between seasons —but even the often insensitive Nathan character seems to suspect this was all a bad idea. “We were over 10 minutes into this episode with zero laughs,” he tells us in the premiere. “And therein lies my dilemma. I was both the best and worst person to solve this problem.”
(*) There’s an amusing reference to this in one of the new episodes, where someone suggests getting kids involved in one of the rehearsals, and Nathan sheepishly says they decided not to do that this time, after how mad some people got about the first season finale.
If the size of the problem is much bigger than the ones from the first season, so is the ludicrous scale of most of the solutions. These include building a detailed recreation of part of a terminal of Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, and staging, as Nathan puts it, a “singing competition that’s part of a TV show that has nothing to with singing.” It’s in these wildly convoluted approaches that The Rehearsal remains the funniest. One episode about Nathan trying to get inside the head of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger —a.k.a. the captain who miraculously landed a damaged passenger jet in the Hudson River in 2009 —is so over-the-top, your mind may simply refuse to accept what your eyes are seeing.
Season Two somehow goes down even deeper and more self-referential rabbit holes than last season’s episode about the Fielder Method. There are a surprising number of references to The Curse, the Showtime drama Fielder made with Benny Safdie and Emma Stone (which had its own divisive finale), as well as to Paramount+ globally removing an old episode of Nathan for You because it referenced the Holocaust, and the company’s German division is eliminating that kind of content for “sensitivities.” (“This is real, by the way,” narrates Fielder.)
Inevitably, though, every problem raised, and every surreal route Nathan takes to solving it, comes back to his difficulty communicating with other people, and in turn getting them to like him. “I’ve always felt sincerity is overrated,” he declares at one point. “It just ends up punishing those who can’t perform it as well as others.” And in this case, the scope of the season’s main subject, and the life-and-death nature of it, makes Nathan’s personality feel more beside the point than usual. This is arguably the point of it all — Fielder trying to set up the most extreme contrast between the task at hand and what his fictionalized self really cares about —but comedically, it doesn’t quite mesh. The season’s biggest laughs rarely have anything to do with his struggle for connection. And at the same time, the ridiculousness of how he tries to address the crash problem undercuts any attempt to play the personal material —including a discussion of whether Nathan is on the autism spectrum —even vaguely seriously.
At one point, we see grainy VHS footage of an adolescent Fielder performing magic for little kids. The stunt he pulls off in the finale is so massive, it makes everything else he’s done in his career —including starring in a premium cable series opposite a two-time Oscar winner —seem as small and primitive as that ancient video recording. But, like a lot of The Rehearsal Season Two, it’s almost too massive for its own good, inviting you to marvel at the fact that Fielder did it at all, rather than find a comic idea within it, or use it to affirm the argument Nathan is making about how to reduce the number of airline crashes. It feels more like the kind of idea Nathan Fielder the character would want to do than Nathan Fielder the comedian.
Season two of The Rehearsal debuts April 20 on HBO and Max, with episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all six episodes.
