‘The Rehearsal’ Season 2 Review: Nathan Fielder Is a Mad Genius

Nathan Fielder pushed the limits of his brand of hyper-real comedy for 2022’s first season of The Rehearsal. The deadpan comedy style that challenges real people to real-time react to his hijinks was taken to another level when Fielder was suddenly building replicas of real places on sound stages in order to help “real people” rehearse intense life events. But that doesn’t make his work reality TV (even though he examined the weirdness of that practice in his scripted series, The Curse). It’s not a documentary, either, even though that’s his often-used shield word when pitching his marks to appear on camera. His elaborate gags are always, in some way, a study of human behavior and interaction. So, upping the ante for the latest season, he’s taken a look at the sort of social situations that might contribute to plane crashes.

This second season of The Rehearsal has Fielder challenging the FAA standards of safety and training after he discovers that many plane crashes seem to have happened during a miscommunication between the captain and the first officer. Flipping through black box transcripts while hoping John Joseph Goglia (a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board and an inductee to the National Aviation Hall of Fame) will take him seriously, he points out the times the captain seemed to ignore the first officer’s suggestions, or where the first officer seemed too intimidated to speak up. Positing that a social dynamic seemed to break down important communication, Fielder suggests studying how pilots interact as a means of removing this possible safety threat. So, naturally, that means building a replica of the Houston airport and a realistic flight simulator so he can first study pilots, then have them rehearse the best ways to ensure their communication is not a safety issue.

Fielder’s stories are never that simple, and while he insists this is all about aviation safety, he is using plane crashes as a way into conversations about politics, law and policy, human behavior, gender and power dynamics, and society and human behavior at large. How do all of these things contribute to the goings-on of a pocket world of two people locked in a cockpit with a trunk full of lives in their hands? Throughout the experiment, he also challenges how he is viewed as a clown or a comedian while attempting to tackle something increasingly serious.

It requires a lot of trust in Nathan Fielder and his reputation as an entertainer to completely buy into his progressively absurd and dramatic ventures. For much of the first half of this season, he examines how HBO will only give him the money as long as what he’s doing is “entertaining.” He’s a comedian, after all, and his deadpan delivery can read dramatic when the absurdity of situations is peeled back. Repeating the trajectory of the first season, the absurdity starts at the max (there being an entire episode where he creates a giant house and family to proportionately fit into the world of a baby Sully Sullenberger), and it slowly melts away as he turns the cameras away from his marks (the young pilots he coaches on personal relationships and confidence) and onto himself. If he was Willy Wonka in season one, this time, he’s Stanley Kubrick if he really did fake the moon landing.

So is it funny? Of course. The gags of Fielder’s humor are so embedded in the massive comedic exercise, that one can only guffaw when things like a call with United Airlines’ PR team is revealed to be a “rehearsal,” or when he crafts a set reminiscent of Nazi Germany as a means of practicing a conversation with Paramount. Nathan has always examined human psychology, him referencing and being compared to works of Stanley Milgram or Harold Garfinkel, and he manages to suck humor from things like people tasting poo flavored yogurt, and now, the distinctions between acting and reality that might allow a partner to comfortably watch their significant other make out with someone else. Fielder finds humor in the absurdity of it all, sure, but also in his propensity to call his stunts and antics “solutions” when they’re really elaborate games that somehow sit just adjacent to instinct or logic.

Fielder’s premises are so elaborate that it feels impossible to imagine how he arrives at them. In the season two finale, there are scenes of him studying and practicing (rehearsing?) that shine a light on the sort of work we can only assume the comedian does leading up to each season premier. I’ve seen Finding Francis (the finale of Nathan for You) described as a miracle, but one has to wonder how much of it was an elaborately planned ruse. Looks back and side-quests in his Comedy Central show often highlight how difficult it might be to create these complex stories, and time them for larger show beats. (Did he really get a guy to change his name to Mike Richards off the cuff? It must have taken months!). So while this finale seems to be an elaborate large-scale timed stunt, one has to wonder exactly where Fielder started and then went before an audience sees him pop up on the screen in the season premiere. There’s no showcase of backstory or prep work, the opener has Nathan already having prepped his appeal to Goglia leaving the audience to ponder exactly how many ideas Fielder (and his writing team- Carrie Kemper, Eric Notarnicola, and Adam Locke-Norton) explored before finding one that would allow him to follow this six-episode journey through aviation safety. Crashes being in the news so often, it’s tempting to call him a soothsayer, but Fielder is more likely like Community’s Abed Nadir with his keen attention to the details of human interaction looking like clairvoyance.

Nathan Fielder is a mad genius in the truest sense, him spending an entire career slipping further into examinations of human behavior while sinking deeper into his own character. He not only blurs the lines of reality and schtick, but also of comedy and drama, finding subtle crackles of jest in somber stories about flying planes. Fielder looked directly into a camera and told a story about humanity, plane crashes, politics and policy, and mental illness and on the other side of it is an audience of people experiencing the year 2025. Nathan Fielder isn’t clairvoyant; he is a scholar of human nature who might seem anxious enough to over prepare for every single situation but isn’t afraid to fly a plane as a bit.

The Rehearsal’s second season premiers April 20, 2025 and will release weekly on Sundays on Max