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The first season of Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal” was an extended attack on its own premise. In the HBO series’ first episode, the Canadian comedian laid out his central thesis — that meticulously recreating the conditions of real life would leave one better prepared for the real thing — and successfully executed a rehearsal of a trivia night in Brooklyn. The win would prove Fielder’s last. Gradually, Fielder’s framework falls apart, first for his volunteer subjects and eventually for himself. Confronted with the emotional agony of a child actor who had confused Fielder for his actual father, the protagonist of “The Rehearsal” was forced to admit that sometimes, “life’s better with surprises.”
The neatness of this unwinding arc, and the totality of Fielder’s statement on the futility of control, made the mere prospect of a Season 2 almost as unsettling as Fielder’s work is actually to watch. Having doubled down on the rehearsal enterprise despite its proven pitfalls, what lines would Fielder’s on-screen persona cross? To what psychic depths would he descend? And how would the actual Fielder, working in tight-lipped secrecy with a team that includes writers Carrie Kemper, Eric Notarnicola and Adam Locke-Norton, advance a master narrative that had already reached such a satisfying conclusion?
Nearly three years later, Season 2 of “The Rehearsal” finally premieres on April 20. In the season premiere, Fielder makes no grand re-introduction. There’s no synopsis of last season’s events, nor an explicit argument why the rehearsal process is still worth trying — just mementos like the fake bar where Fielder staged his trivia night, now preserved in amber on an L.A. soundstage, and a haunting reference to a new policy on not rehearsing with kids. Instead, Fielder dives straight into his model’s latest application, an undertaking for which “The Rehearsal” abandons the procedural model to pursue for the entire six-episode season: preventing plane crashes by improving communication between airline pilots.
Fielder doesn’t even explain why or how he came to be so interested in aviation. With crashes so frequently in the news these days, it’s tempting to attribute this newfound passion to sheer clairvoyance. Slowly, though, the metaphor becomes clear: as the star, director, producer and co-writer of “The Rehearsal,” and Comedy Central’s “Nathan for You” before it, Fielder is nothing if not the captain of his own ship. Which means his armchair diagnosis of pilots’ social dynamics — that disasters often happen because pilots aren’t comfortable speaking up and expressing their true feelings when they notice something’s amiss — is, of course, a projection of the chronically awkward outsider’s own issues.
As it turns out, diagnosis itself is a major theme of Season 2, laid atop longstanding Fielderverse concerns like social performance, alienation and the porous, possibly arbitrary line between real and fake. Thematically, it’s not quite enough new material to avoid undermining the perfectly discomfiting end of Season 1 — to this critic’s mind, one of the great works of television storytelling this decade. Logistically, however, Season 2 of “The Rehearsal” takes Fielder’s operation to quite literal new heights, from our nation’s halls of power to nightmarish simulations to the other side of the globe. Fielder and his team remain committed to besting themselves, even when there’s no longer as organic a fusion between feats of filmmaking and psychological insight.
The Fielder of Season 2 has seamlessly incorporated rehearsal into his daily routine. So seamlessly, in fact, that it’s sometimes hard to notice: when Fielder calls the public relations department at United Airlines to ask about featuring employees on the show, the representative seems unusually skeptical until we realize she’s an actress Fielder hired to prepare him for the actual call. With this baseline established, Fielder starts to get weird with the contours of his now-signature technique. Can animals rehearse, too? Could you run many variations of the same experiment at once, like an actual scientist controlling for variables? Does surrounding a subject with a “pack” of lookalikes who speak in unison help alleviate their anxiety? In Season 2, when a jaded audience will barely bat an eye at Fielder recreating an entire airport terminal down to the fast food options, he aims to find out.
Fielder also starts to incorporate the reception to Season 1 and his career since it premiered. A meta quality has always been integral to a character named Nathan Fielder, played by a man named Nathan Fielder, who casts real people in his stories under often-false pretenses. In Season 2, this tactic has both escalated applications and mixed results. When Fielder, playing the straight-faced role of safety advocate, bemoans that comedians have a hard time being taken seriously (“It can be difficult to overcome the deficit of credibility you’ve created for yourself”), he does so on an HBO show that regularly generates essays from highbrow outlets like the New York Review of Books. In truth, few comedians in history have had an easier time being treated like more than a court jester, taking the bite out of Fielder’s subsequent lament that “a part of you starts to believe that [humor]’s all you have to offer.” Fielder’s fascination with actors as magicians who can believably feign the emotions he can’t even authentically express gets interrupted by clips from his performance in Showtime’s “The Curse” — a reminder, along with his immaculate poker face, that Fielder is in fact a very good actor.
On the other hand, Fielder incorporates the response of viewers who’ve assessed him with the same distance, presumption and limited information that mark his own relationship to pilots. Where fans saw their own autism or anxiety reflected in Fielder’s ever-offputting stiffness (“Talking to other people is never easy, no matter how close you get to them,” his voiceover states with universalizing confidence), Fielder starts to wonder if they can see something he doesn’t — and to use his prodigious resources to see if they’re right.
This thread turns out to be the core of the season, even if it’s not revealed as such until Fielder’s final line of voiceover. If Season 1 captured the experience of getting lost in one’s own self-obsessive spiral, then Season 2 channels the feeling of voicing a thought only to find people look at you differently. Fielder continues to have a knack for finding extreme personalities happy to show their quirks on camera, but “The Rehearsal” remains a show about his own journey, like when he tasks some pilots with judging a singing competition to echo his own first job in entertainment, on “Canadian Idol.” This may be why the story of Season 2, if not its undeniably impressive stunts, can feel auxiliary — like a spinoff with an extremely specific, transportation-related theme. “The Rehearsal” already brought the Nathan Fielder character to a crucial inflection point. And as his new colleagues well know, cruising altitude isn’t nearly as eventful as takeoff or landing.
Season 2 of “The Rehearsal” will premiere at 10:30pm ET on Sunday, April 20 on HBO, with remaining episodes airing weekly on Sundays.
