The Rehearsal season two: Nathan Fielder’s strange and original series is one hell of a ride

What even is The Rehearsal? Officially, it has the broad label of “comedy series” but Nathan Fielder’s show could be anything and everything.

It’s presented as a docuseries with The Rehearsal straddles the line between truth and fiction both textually and metatextually. Its first season, which was released in 2022, was discombobulating to say the least, provoking questions of whether the whole thing was a hoax.

Three years on, there’s been no “gotcha!” revelations so it seems we’ll have to take Fielder at his word.

Originally, the show featured the Canadian comedian proposing a simple enough thing: What if you could build a simulation and rehearse upcoming moments from your life so you could map out potential outcomes and adjust your actions accordingly?

The first scenario involved a man who wanted to confess to his pub trivia friend that he lied about having a masters degree. Fielder built an exact replica of their bar and hired actors to react in different ways. That ramped up in subsequent episodes when a woman wanted to “try out” motherhood before deciding to be a parent.

For a series that blended actors with supposed real-life people, you were never sure of what you were watching.

By the time the first season ended, Fielder with his monotone, seemingly distanced persona, had raised existential questions about how we live our lives. What of chance, spontaneity and surprise?

The second season is seemingly more straightforward. For one thing, we at least know some of the participants are real because they have actual profiles, including former National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia, and US congressman Steve Cohen.

For this instalment, Fielder has turned his attention to airline safety. In the time between seasons, he’s picked up the hobby of scouring through crash reports and has come up with theory that a swathe of disasters can be traced back to communications issues between the captain and co-pilot.

Specifically, he identified a timidity on the part of the junior member to challenge their superior as a contributory factor to why planes crash.

His mission is thus: Investigate why co-pilots hesitate to speak up and if there was anything to be done to change this common dynamic, and thereby prevent future incidents.

With a clear throughline across the six episodes, this second season is, in a way, more accessible. But that doesn’t mean it’s been dumbed down or is less bold. Fielder still pulls a bunch of mercurial stunts to explore his conceit.

He stages a pseudo-reality TV singing competition, recreating conditions from his own time as a producer on Canadian Idol. Co-pilots are chosen to be the judges to see if giving hopefuls rejections and bad news instils new behaviours and frees them to be honest in their chosen profession.

He also tries to make a link between communications in the cockpit with how co-pilots engage themselves in their personal life. One guy who admits to avoiding hard conversations with his girlfriend is asked to finally have that conversation with her while she’s dressed like an airline captain and sitting next to him in a cockpit simulation. Another who struggles with starting a connection with potential matches is monitored to see if he can pick up signals from actors.

The point is to see whether pilots, who often live isolated, transient lives, can change. There are off-kilter experiments to test how much of this is nature and how much of it is nurture.

One episode involves a cloned dog and recreating the home environment of the original canine while another, the most visually bonkers one, features Fielder play acting seminal moments from Chesley Sullenberger’s biography to see if the Miracle on the Hudson pilot’s formative experiences led to his successful landing.

The Sullenberger sequence is an uncomfortable laugh riot. When confronted with the visual of Fielder dressed as baby Sully being lifted into a plus-sized cot in a gigantic nursery designed to be proportionate to the size of an adult man costumed as a bub, you don’t know whether to shudder or cackle. Probably both.

The thing that ties together The Rehearsal is Fielder’s seemingly guileless curiosity. But making TV is inherently a synthetic, manipulated enterprise trying to evoke certain questions, conversations and emotions.

It’s to Fielder’s credit that he gives off, for the most part until the final reveal when certain things are made clear, the impression that he is a kind of Virgil stand-in, guiding us through with a laptop strapped around his neck, just seeing where it goes.

The end was inevitable but the journey is one hell of an original ride.

The Rehearsal is streaming on Max with new episodes on Monday