‘The Rehearsal’ Review: Nathan Fielder’s Comedy of Control and Anxiety

Nathan Fielder’s work occupies a category all its own: he is, essentially, the sole practitioner of a genre that is difficult to define. Across all his series, reality and fiction overlap in stacked, tangled layers, but it is in The Rehearsal that this approach feels most explicit, since the show is directly about that very overlap. As in the first season, the six episodes of the second set out to scrutinize social behavior, the tiny mechanics of interpersonal relationships, and the unlikely pursuit of personal goals. All of this theoretical ambition unfolds, moreover, within something that is ostensibly a comedy.

Like its predecessor, the new season begins with what seems to be a clear objective, only to veer off course repeatedly. Nathan Fielder—director, creator, and star of the series (or his fictional alter ego, played by himself)—is obsessed with plane crashes and convinced that most of them stem from misunderstandings between pilot and co-pilot. He has binders full of cockpit dialogue, which he recreates with actors in flight simulators, apparently proving that a co-pilot’s fear of telling the pilot he is doing something wrong—and of taking control himself—is a problem that needs to be solved. The question, of course, is how.

Fielder starts by recreating an entire airport and hiring both real pilots and actors playing pilots to rehearse and test different ways of overcoming the tensions that block more honest communication. As always in his projects—from Nathan for You to The Curse—the specificity of the premise gradually expands into other territories, including politics, music, performance, and, most crucially, Fielder himself. Once again, the series moves from the public to the private, from the social to the personal, until it circles back to Fielder’s own anxieties, traumas, and limitations as the ultimate destination of this elaborate process.

It would not be inaccurate to describe The Rehearsal as the most expensive therapy in the world—one in which Fielder has convinced HBO executives to bankroll his internal conflicts under the guise of an ambitious audiovisual project. With a generous budget that allows him to build complex sets, stage an internal reality show, hire hundreds of actors, log endless hours in flight simulators, and even rent a 737, the series becomes an intricate creative game that ultimately turns inward, helping Fielder confront the doubts and fears that haunt him.

All of this, of course, may itself be part of the game. It is impossible to know for sure whether Fielder’s fears (which will eventually become clear) are genuine or carefully constructed for the series. The same uncertainty applies to almost everything else. The Rehearsal crosses the line between reality and fiction so many times that eventually the viewer stops trying to distinguish one from the other and instead focuses on observing how the machinery is built and how it operates. At that point, the core of the project is no longer about what is real or staged, but about understanding the purpose of this procedure, which at times recalls the conceit imagined by Charlie Kaufman in Synecdoche, New York: an enormous apparatus constructed around its protagonist, with an intimate, personal—almost narcissistic—dramatic center.

The show’s methods can be extreme, ranging from reconstructing the entire life of a famous pilot to understand a crucial decision, to translating flight simulations into real-world scenarios with all the risks that entails, to grappling with the practical challenges of producing a show like this (including a dispute Fielder has with another streaming platform that is both funny and unsettling). Narratively, the material may seem arranged in a capricious way, but it follows a deep internal logic: everything responds to, or attempts to answer, the same underlying question—how does one function in the world?

Does Fielder genuinely worry about plane crashes as such? Is there a rigorous investigation behind the claim that cockpit misunderstandings cause most of them? I am not convinced that this is truly the point. What seems to fascinate—and perhaps trouble—him far more are the minute details of human interaction: how do you tell someone something they may not want to hear? How do you overcome the fear of talking to someone you like? What is the secret to feeling more confident and not being intimidated by others? How do you make people like you, sound convincing, project self-assurance? The “rehearsals” of The Rehearsal return, once again, to these questions, probing how much control we can exert over the world around us—ideally, without losing our lives in the process.