The Rehearsal: Nathan Fielder makes genius appointment TV … that may spoil you forever

The Guardian

24-05-2025

Schopenhauer defined genius as someone who aims at a target the rest of us can't see. Which raises a philosophical paradox – how do we know they've hit it? I was moved to such musings while watching this week's pick, a singular piece of art that functions unlike anything else on TV, and calls the medium itself into question. No, it's not Police Interceptors.
In The Rehearsal (Monday, 10pm, Sky Comedy), comedian Nathan Fielder blends documentary, social experiment, performance art and absurdist satire in a devised method all his own. He has ordinary people tackle emotionally fraught situations from their lives, by role-playing them with hired actors in meticulously recreated sets that mirror significant personal locations. It's arch, but the stakes are real. The first series opened with a man who wanted to apologise to his pub quiz teammates for cheating, before pivoting to a woman who wasn't sure whether she wanted to become a mother. Mamma mia!
Here we go again – and this new series ups the ante. With undertones of Malcolm Gladwell, Fielder identifies that aviation disasters are mostly a result of communication awkwardness in the cockpit. Can he help first officers speak up when they notice pilot errors, and thereby stop people dying in plane crashes? Is comedy the right vehicle for this? Is that funny? Fielder sets out his stall, while stepping over a blood-covered actor who whispers 'Help' from a wreckage of twisted fuselage. Do you remember your first olive – the sensation of not being sure what you were eating? This is like that.
The furrow the show ploughs is fantastically winding, and bone dry. Fielder's monotone narration is matched by his clownish, Beckettian imagination (and limitless HBO budget). In one experiment, a triplet of cloned dogs are trained to become more like their deceased donor. A compressor transports air across the country to recreate the atmosphere of a specific city. An airport is reconstructed, with 70 actors playing the public, flight crew and shop assistants. Fielder uses cranes and gargantuan puppets to experience the babyhood of heroic pilot Chesley Sullenberger in a Freudian scene of horrifying proportions. I won't spoil it here – but it may spoil you for ever.
The visuals are part of what makes this appointment TV. In another strand, Fielder intervenes in the dating life of a shy first officer – enlisting a group of actors to surround and mimic him, to illustrate the theory that working in packs builds confidence. Fielder encourages one of these actors to pursue a romantic relationship with the subject. He then sets up a warehouse of rooms of actors recreating that relationship. When those simulated relationships turn sexual, he brings in the actors' real-life partners to observe from behind a monitor. He piles ethical grey areas on top of each other like problematic pancakes.
Since Nathan for You in 2013, Fielder has warped the tracks of reality TV, pushing its artifice into surreal places. Controversy, too. He has been accused by participants of emotional manipulation. Which is the point. I don't know if the real subjects here are also actors, or if Fielder cares about aviation safety. The show could be a lampoon of gestalt therapy or the moral hypocrisy of television, or a fever dream arising from its creator's own anxieties. 'I've always thought sincerity was overrated,' reflects Fielder casually, the sort of thing you'd read in a Sartre novel. 'It just ends up punishing those who can't perform it as well as others.'
I knew one genius in my life, many years ago. A man who, after a short while in anyone's company, saw through them like an X-ray. Without judgment, he was able to lay bare people's deepest insecurities and dreams, unpick their social persona and even predict their fantasies. Everyone hated him. They thought he was a witch.
Likewise, The Rehearsal won't be to everyone's taste. I'm not even sure it's to mine. A self-cannibalising satire of television ethics might be too smart to be beloved. But you should watch it. Inscrutable, wilfully awkward, wayward, serious of purpose and a shaggy dog story, no one's doing it like Fielder.