‘The Rehearsal’

Nathan Fielder loves an elaborate plan. In the TV show that made his name, Nathan for You, the Canadian satirist played an exaggerated version of himself – affectless, sexless, awkward yet oddly confident – who offered terrible advice to real-life business owners. He meets a restaurateur, for instance, who is struggling to get permission to sell his chili con carne inside a nearby hockey stadium. Fielder ‘helps’ him by inventing a heat-resistant body suit that he fills with the chili, smuggling it into a game and dispensing it through hidden tubes; in a subplot, he tricks a doctor into thinking that he has a pacemaker to get a medical exemption that allows him through the stadium’s metal detectors.

The show, which parodied the format and tone of reality television, produced interactions with real people that (as in Brass Eye or Da Ali G Show) were almost unwatchable. What made them funny was the scale and complexity of Fielder’s escapades, and the way his subjects (or targets) allowed themselves to be swept into the ludicrous.

Producing an episode of Nathan for You was an exercise in rigorous planning: Fielder and his team would role-play how people might react to his outlandish suggestions. His next show, The Rehearsal, offered this method as a service. Using the large HBO budget at his disposal, Fielder conjured hyper-exact recreations of the built environment to help people practise for difficult interactions. ‘If you plan for every variable,’ he narrates in his characteristically flat voice, ‘a happy outcome doesn’t have to be left to chance.’ Subjects were recruited via an advert on Craigslist: ‘TV opportunity: is there something you’re avoiding?’

In the first episode, Fielder builds a replica of a Brooklyn bar and fills it with actors to help a pub quizzer gain the confidence to confess to his teammate that he does not, in fact, have a postgraduate degree. In the rest of the series Fielder puts himself at the centre of a long, agonising rehearsal for fatherhood built around a co-parenting experiment with a cast of child actors. (A recurring theme in Fielder’s work is his persona’s inability to form meaningful relationships.) By the end, one of the children seems to have mistaken Fielder for his real father. If the silly, unscripted collisions of Nathan for You positioned Fielder as a latter-day Sacha Baron Cohen, The Rehearsal’s formal and dramatic ambitions saw him hailed by some critics as a comedy auteur. With rehearsals for the rehearsals, it becomes very hard to tell how much has been rehearsed or scripted and how much is spontaneous or ‘real’. But there were also those, such as Richard Brody of the New Yorker, who charged Fielder with cruelty.

Fielder is clearly aware of these criticisms; Brody’s negative review appears briefly on a computer screen in the second season of The Rehearsal, which came out on 26 May in the UK. This time, Fielder’s subject isn’t fatherhood but aviation disasters. He has become obsessed with plane crashes and, in particular, with communication problems between pilots and co-pilots. The inability of co-pilots to speak up under pressure has long been recognised as a problem, but Fielder claims it’s the ‘number one contributing factor to aviation crashes in history’. A retired federal aviation regulator joins him on a circuitous journey to solve it, involving a fake competition show with pilot judges, a fake congressional hearing and an airborne finale that appears to be real.

It’s a much better piece of television than the first season. Fielder-the-character is kinder this time. He is less interested in needling the viewer into thinking his subjects are being exploited or stewing in his existential ill-ease; he is more interested in teasing humour from the world. Prompted by the discovery that after 7 October 2023, Paramount Plus Germany removed an episode of Nathan for You from its streaming platform because of ‘sensitivities’ over the Holocaust, one subplot features a memorable send-up of German anti-antisemitism. And in another, particularly deranged episode, Fielder re-enacts the life of Captain Chesley ‘Sully’ Sullenberger, the pilot who heroically landed a passenger plane on the Hudson River in 2009. To relive Sully’s infancy, Fielder transforms himself into a shaved baby and drinks milk from the breast of a giant puppet.

Volunteers in Fielder’s previous experiments tended to be drawn from particular strata of US society: jobbing actors, struggling entrepreneurs, lonely people who respond to online ads. They lent themselves to sympathy, even pity, which his persona rarely afforded them. But the pilots in season two of The Rehearsal make for a more robust subject. Stirring the emotional residue of their private lives, as Fielder spends most of the series doing, doesn’t feel so exploitative; the point is to interrogate why they find it hard to say what’s on their minds. His solution is to encourage pilots to see their relationships with each other in the cockpit as a performance in which they’re given permission to be bolder. ‘Maybe we all need an excuse to be our true selves,’ he suggests.

Fielder got his break in 2007 on a Canadian news parody show, conducting the kind of prankish interviews that were popular at the time. A cinematic analogue for his more recent output may be the documentaries of Ros McElwee, whose Sherman’s March (1986) follows the film-maker’s decision to accept a grant to make a film about the Civil War and instead interview girlfriends about his doomed love life. The Rehearsal has been compared to Tom McCarthy’s novel Remainder – whose amnesiac protagonist commissions a multimillion pound recreation of a block of flats he thinks he once lived in – and Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, which sees a theatre director lost in a city-sized production. What’s most distinctive about Fielder, though, is his commitment to the bit, and this signals a debt to Andy Kaufman, the American ‘anti-comedian’ who blurred distinctions between self and character, performance and reality, in his late-night TV antics. If Fielder died tomorrow, there would be plenty of people who believed – as some Kaufman fans do – that the death was staged.

This commitment to the bit reaches a new height in the final episode of the new season, when Fielder reveals that he has been learning to fly: ‘I decided there was no better way to understand pilots than to become one myself.’ We watch cockpit footage taken from the two years he has spent acquiring advanced licences to become a certified commercial pilot. He buys a used 737 jet, which, in the show’s climax, he flies, having filled it with dozens of his actors cast as passengers. The point is to test out his role-playing method in real-world conditions. Will his co-pilot speak up if he makes a mistake? Will he be able to land? We’re plunged into the thrills of genre – all the artifice has produced real feeling.

In a coda, Fielder reveals that he now has a side job recovering empty planes for the airline industry. I contacted the company whose logo is visible on his shirt, Nomadic Aviation Group, and asked if they could confirm that the Canadian satirist Nathan Fielder really is one of their pilots. I haven’t heard back.