When people have asked me for TV recommendations recently, my primary answer has been the second season of Nathan Fielder’s HBO show The Rehearsal. The next question, fairly enough, tends to be: what’s it about? And, here, I have floundered, giving some kind of garbled answer containing a combination of the words “comedy, sort of”, “reality TV satire” and—most irritating to my poor listener, no doubt, who by now has no intention of watching this show—“performance art”.
On the face of it, Canadian comedian Fielder’s show is, naturally, a comedy. The premise is that Fielder helps members of the public minutely rehearse situations they are dreading in their personal lives. In the first season, Fielder builds a perfect replica of a man’s pub quiz bar where he plans to meet a friend to admit to her that he doesn’t have the college degree he said he did, and helps a woman decide whether she wants children by hiring a cast of child actors and pretending to be the woman’s partner to create a simulacrum of parenting. The core rehearsals beget other rehearsals: Fielder rehearses meeting the pub-quizzer himself for the first time and recreates the parenting rehearsals to see where they ultimately went astray. Unsurprisingly, the parenting recreation gets ethically muddy, with one of the children seemingly starting to view Fielder as his real father.
It’s not, as you might have gleaned by now, all that funny. You can find plenty of clips of Fielder early in his career doing a much more well-trodden style of satirical comedy. In the mid-2000s, he appeared on the Canadian news parody show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, in which he does things like pretend to file a report from Naples about pizza, though it has obviously being shot in Nova Scotia. In that particular clip, he interviews a real Halifax pizzeria owner and asks him to pretend that they are in Italy. The owner is unsure at first, but then agrees. Why? Because people will agree to do all kinds of things if you point a camera at them.
This is the fact that underpins Fielder’s series Nathan for You. In that show, Fielder presented himself as an expert who could help struggling small businesses turn their fortunes around with out-of-the-box thinking. And the joke is on the people Fielder persuades to do absurd things for their 15 minutes of fame, for the most part.
Fielder has now turned to a very serious problem: miscommunication between co-pilots leading to airline crashes
For the second season of The Rehearsal, Fielder turns his attention to what seems to be a very real and serious problem in the world: miscommunication between co-pilots leading to commercial airline crashes. The rehearsals he now wants to stage involve building a replica of Houston airport and getting deep into the psyche of pilots and their first officers, to ultimately prove to lawmakers that pilot training does not currently prepare them for emergency situations and thereby save lives. Haha.
In the first episode, Fielder foregrounds the essential madness of what he is trying to do: make a comedy show and, at the same time, attempt to enact real world change in how pilots communicate with each other. The result is a sort of picaresque that runs through—and then well beyond—the logical answers to questions that occur to Fielder as he navigates the making of this kind of programme. Rehearsals pile up on rehearsals, digressions upon digressions, into pilots’ romantic lives, talent show judging and somehow also dog cloning.
It’s all insane, plainly, and a work of absurd genius. But what makes season two a new height of achievement for Fielder is how the focus of his attention has shifted. What began as the butt of Fielder’s early career jokes, the strange and often pathetic ways that human beings behave with each other, has developed into something more like an area of artistic exploration. His business advice in Nathan for You was terrible, and he knew it. He wasn’t really trying to solve the problems faced by struggling businesses. He had a yoghurt shop develop a shit-flavoured froyo, for God’s sake. He was trying to make us laugh. Whereas, in the second season of The Rehearsal, he has stripped away much of the cringe and the sneering at his unsuspecting targets, and lasered in on the human condition and, more specifically, on his own misadventures in being a person. The person who has really needed help for how to function has, all along, been Fielder himself, and this season of The Rehearsal sees him lean into that realisation more fully than ever before.
I won’t spoil it for you, but the journey into Fielder’s own psyche and his choice to foreground the question “what kind of person would orchestrate all this?” rather than “what can I make people do on television?” is the choice that makes all the madness worth watching. Get on it.
