The Rehearsal Season 2 Review: To Understand Nathan Fielder's Audacious Series, You Have to Understand Nathan Fielder

For all the controversy the first season of The Rehearsal generated online, about everything from the degree to which Nathan Fielder was, or was not, exploiting his subjects to the ethics of using child actors in the show's intricately constructed simulations, Season 2 begins without explaining itself. If you're tuning in for the second season, you're expected to have done all your homework — not only watching the first season of The Rehearsal, which aired all the way back in the summer of 2022, but also Fielder's Comedy Central series Nathan for You; the Showtime dramedy The Curse, which Fielder co-starred in alongside Emma Stone and Benny Safdie; and maybe even the Fielder-produced How to With John Wilson, if you want to get a sense of just how large an impact the comedian's highly specific style has had on television.

To be clear, this is a good thing, and these six episodes are better for it. The Rehearsal Season 2 never attempts to catch up the audience, or do any hand-holding, or decode any of its self-referentialisms. (When Fielder does cite the first season, he does so obliquely: "I made a commitment to myself we weren't gonna use any kids in the rehearsals this season," he says in one episode. "Some people were a little… uh, yeah.") In this respect, The Rehearsal Season 2 often reads like a prize specifically crafted for Fielder's loyal legion of fans who have been voraciously following his work for over a decade. This is the blessing and the curse (sorry) that comes along with enjoying Fielder's work: The reward is a season of truly audacious TV that, at many points, is not only unlike anything else currently airing, but is genuinely unlike anything else I've ever seen, period. The catch is that Fielder is wrestling with the exact same questions he's been wrestling with since Nathan for You began in 2013.

The Rehearsal Season 2 is ostensibly about Fielder's mission to improve aviation safety. (He couldn't have possibly predicted how relevant air crashes would be in 2025, but the timing does feel eerily prescient.) Between seasons, he took a deep interest in the causes of plane disasters ("as a hobby," Fielder says) and noticed a disturbing pattern in many of them, which is that first officers have historically been too intimidated to speak up to plane captains when they notice something going wrong. The issue is a social one, Fielder theorizes, and could be repaired if only there were better communication between co-pilots. And what better way to find a solution than by staging a host of elaborate role-play scenarios?

8.0

The Rehearsal Season 2

at HBO

Like

• The scale of this thing is incredible
• It's sincerely unique

Dislike

• When will Nathan Fielder start asking new questions?

Season 2 recalls many details from the first season, including the show's signature sets in all their ornate detail, as well as the Fielder Method, Fielder's specialized acting technique — which, as many of the participants pointed out, does in fact border on stalking. But rather than set out to help ordinary people prepare for everyday life's various hardships, Fielder goes bigger. As a result, the scale of the series balloons to match his commitment. He repeatedly notes that HBO has essentially written him a "blank check" to make the season, and he's clearly using every dollar he can wring out of them. He and his crew design a full re-creation of the Houston airport. They set up flight simulations. He recruits real pilots to tell their stories and, at one point, act as the judges of a fake singing competition show. He brings in a large group of Fielder Method-trained actors to observe and mimic the pilots. His extreme strategy for studying the mind of Sully Sullenberger will likely shock even Fielder's most diehard fans. It's all in service of getting to the bottom of the communication issue that has created life-or-death scenarios aboard commercial flights. Fielder is aware that his reputation as a comedian and a prankster creates a high barrier to entry into such a serious, government-adjacent field. And he does aim to take this directly to the government: One of his end goals, he states upfront, is to eventually be invited to speak about aviation safety in front of Congress in the hope of creating real change.

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It's hard to know what's real and what isn't with The Rehearsal. That's part of the show's charm, baked into its DNA, dating back to the brain-melting scene that ended its pilot episode. It's certainly easy to trust that the real Fielder cares about aviation disasters, in the sense that most people do care about stopping preventable disasters. Here, he goes to such great lengths to prove his point that you have to believe he wouldn't have dedicated years of his life to it if he wasn't invested. But the questions at the center of The Rehearsal's second season remain the same as ever: Why don't people like Nathan Fielder, both the character and the man? What is he doing wrong, and why does connecting seem so easy for others?

He grappled with this dilemma throughout every season of Nathan for You (which is called back to early in The Rehearsal's second season in a storyline guaranteed to spark chatter, when Fielder puts Paramount on blast for removing an episode that dealt with Holocaust awareness from its streaming service), and the character he played on The Curse struggled with it, too. The monotone, straight-faced character of Nathan Fielder, played by Nathan Fielder himself, is so well performed that it's impossible to know how much of it is true to the real guy and how much he's putting on for the cameras. "I've always felt that sincerity is overrated," he says at one point. "It just punishes those who can't perform it as well as others." This feels like self-defense after Fielder declared earlier, "Talking to other people is never easy, no matter how close you get to them."

Establishing that meta narrative has been a throughline in all of Fielder's work, but it's amplified at several points here, to shaky results. He frequently diverges from the overarching idea of aviation safety to go on mini side quests, like when he attempts to test whether the Fielder Method can be used on a dog, or when he discovers how popular the first season of The Rehearsal was among members of the autistic community. (On a few different occasions, Fielder skids to a halt when confronted with the prospect of addressing whether he himself is autistic.) A running theme is Fielder's concern that The Rehearsal cannot be a legitimate vehicle for change without sacrificing entertainment. He spends much of the season trying desperately to connect his side quests to the main idea — in other words, trying to get people to listen to a grave issue by using comedy as a way in. If it worked better on the smaller, more human scale created in Season 1, it's still tough not to admire Fielder's ambition. 

One of the most fascinating aspects of The Rehearsal's first season was how it showed reality television's invisible strings. Season 2 pulls back from deconstructing reality TV, but it goes all in on its concept, which is Fielder's theory that life would improve if only people could prepare for every possible outcome. It's a theory that Fielder could go on with for as long as he wants to; The Rehearsal hasn't yet been renewed for a third season, but by the end of Season 2, it's easy to make the case for its continuation. Fielder is one of our greatest showmen, even if you do sometimes wish he'd learn a new trick.

Premieres: Sunday, April 20 at 10:30/9:30c on HBO
Who's in it: Nathan Fielder
Who's behind it: Nathan Fielder
For fans of: Nathan Fielder
How many episodes we watched: 6 of 6