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The Guardian
13-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Alienating, awkward, anxiety-inducing: why The Rehearsal is TV's most fascinating show
What do couples counseling, a reality-singing competition, three cloned Yorkies, the content moderation of Paramount+ Germany and aviation safety all have in common? Virtually nothing, except the interest of television mastermind Nathan Fielder, who braids such disparate concepts together in the galaxy-brained second season of The Rehearsal. In just four episodes, the genre-bending show of elaborate simulations – essentially, extremely realistic role-playing in the name of preparing people for uncomfortable situations – has provided some of the most compelling, bizarre and dementedly brilliant scenes on television this year: a shy commercial airline pilot on a first date, accompanied by 20 actors mirroring his every move. Fielder, sporting his series uniform laptop harness, peering into a 'wrecked' cockpit through pretend flames. The sight of the Lizard Lounge – an exact replica of Brooklyn's Alligator Lounge, where Fielder was tending bar just last month – inside an exact replica of a section of Houston's George Bush airport. And in a scene that was shockingly transgressive even for a docu-comedy auteur who has built a career on stretching the outer boundaries of reality television, the sight of Fielder, shaven, rubber-capped and diapered, suckling from the papier-mache teat of a puppet 50s housewife as part of a canonically insane, deeply sincere attempt to relive the life – and thus absorb the wisdom – of Captain Sully Sullenberger (of Tom Hanks biopic, crashing into the Hudson fame). If you haven't seen The Rehearsal or aren't acclimatized to Fielder's ultra-cringe brand of experimental comedy, this likely sounds deeply off-putting, tedious and/or nonsensical. And it is – Fielder's comedy, which could more accurately be described as Rube Goldberg-esque social experiments pursued to such absurd ends and with such deadpan narration as to produce laughter, is deliberately alienating. Zigging where others would zag, getting hung up on what others would glide past, building arcane in-jokes with long-simmering payoffs in the lane of erstwhile prestige TV dramas, it is television probing the human condition – how people think, why they behave a certain way, how they react to off-script social interactions – that is difficult to explain to other humans, difficult to follow and at times difficult to watch. And yet, it is appointment television, a truly singular meditation on artifice and authenticity, performance and sincerity, that has only improved with its second season. The Rehearsal's first outing, which aired in 2022, introduced audiences to Fielder's particular strand of neuroticism and apparent negotiating power at HBO; over six episodes, he constructed numerous simulations to approximate a potential real-life experience, primarily oriented around one woman's deliberation over whether or not to have a child (in one of the show's dicier and rightfully critiqued bits, Fielder played father to a real toddler). Fielder's genius lies as much in episodic structure as in performance of his affectless producer persona – The Rehearsal marked a graduation, of sorts, from the harebrained business schemes of his Comedy Central series Nathan For You to becoming the Penn & Teller of television, pulling off sleights of hand while showing the strings and delivering the most monotone 'abracadabra' imaginable, with a revelatory commitment to, as one fan put it, letting the camera linger long enough to reveal someone to be the weirdest person alive. With the six-episode second season, Fielder has leveled up the scale and stakes of his magic tricks, while further interrogating the production, assumptions and experiences that go into producing reality television, in service of a seemingly noble and topical aim: aviation safety. Fielder theorizes that the No 1 understudied cause of plane crashes is human error compounded by a breakdown communication in the cockpit. Co-pilots, for whatever reason, do not correct pilots when they make a mistake. Based on the number of real crashes Fielder's team re-enacts, with obligatory virtual explosions, via flight simulator in the first episode, this seems to be a reasonable hypothesis. But to prove it, Fielder embarks on a characteristically intricate and involved series of experiments, from recreating the life conditions of a 2011 dog for its clone – the better to test nature v nurture – to encouraging a co-pilot to confront issues with his girlfriend during a simulated flight. There's a certain hyper-competency pleasure to seeing these scenarios play out, to seeing someone's imagination given this much financial and legal runway. But the series is most satisfying, to this TV fan, as a grand deconstruction of the rules of reality TV through elaborate role-play. The fourth episode dissects the series-long assumptions behind hiring actors to say certain lines of dialogue or perform certain scenarios, questioning the logic behind any suspension of disbelief. And one of the series' many side quests include the elaborate staging of an aviation-themed singing competition modeled on Fielder's experience as a 23-year-old junior producer for Canadian Idol – the northern spinoff of American Idol – where he was tasked with rejecting hopeful singers who did not exhibit 'star potential'. The meditation on what makes would-be off-screen staff better at an unenviable task is at once fascinating and practical; theoretically, co-pilot judges – selected because they all share the quality of having not died in a plane crash – who practice rejection would be better prepared to stand up to stubborn captains. Wings of Voice has, like all of Fielder's work, drawn criticism for psychological manipulation and false representation. On Monday, participant Lana Love broke a show NDA to claim that she lost $10,000 and was tricked by the shows producers into thinking she was on a real singing competition show and not, as Fielder calls it, 'a singing competition as part of another TV show that has nothing to do with singing'. A level of manipulation is baked into the Fielderian worldview and school of acting, though I'd argue that, at this point, his methods are easily Googled and the subject of the show's ultimate critique. The Rehearsal season two is, in my view, the least ethically fraught of Fielder's output (and that includes his dramatic turn on HGTV satire The Curse). The show's overarching illusion works because it serves an overall purpose more pointed than the original aim to 'better understand the human condition' – it's impossible to tell how serious Fielder is about changing Federal Aviation Administration training requirements around flight simulations to encourage better cockpit communications, but he seems serious enough about it to devote six episode of expensive television to the cause, with an added argument for pilots to get better therapy. And with a sly, deceptive heart. In the most recent episode, which aired on Sunday, Fielder helps a shy co-pilot named Colin improve his nonexistent romantic life by practicing a first date, with a twist. Having watched enough nature documentaries to know that some animals function well in packs, Fielder recruits a dozen or so actors to hover around Colin, mimicking every move and word, the idea being that it's easier to do things when you're not doing it by yourself. It's very possible that the bashful, social cue-averse Colin was also an unstated actor. Fielder, of course, has his own motives as master puppeteer; the image of Colin sipping coffee echoed by a chorus of other faces does indeed make excellent television. But it also made me tear up, this surreal, distinctly Fielder hack to the unavoidable loneliness of being alive, to the universal discomfort of social awkwardness and personal insecurity. It fails, of course. The show purports to believe that all human behavior can be taught, that all emotions can be simulated and thus controlled. Both the magician and the audience know that life doesn't work that way, but what a wonder to pretend otherwise.
Yahoo
06-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
The Rehearsal connects cloned pets, Sully Sullenberger, and Evanescence
No one threads a surreal narrative needle like Nathan Fielder, and The Rehearsal exists to remind us of that every week. Love him or hate him, if you choose to strap into his comedic roller-coaster, at the very least you will be surprised. In 'Pilot's Code,' he takes the audience on a winding path that connects pet cloning, poor pilot communication in the cockpit, the hero pilot Sully Sullenberger, lactating puppets, iPods and the band Evanescence. No, that's not me just randomly connecting words to make you laugh. That's literally Fielder's train of thought. Our host opens the episode promising that he really is trying to take the human mind seriously in this series, so he wants to be cognizant of the safety of his pilot and co-pilot subjects. Instead of conducting 'unproven testing' on his pilot volunteers, he wants to run some of his risker experimental tests on animals first because 'we did evolve from them.' He then proceeds to find a married couple, Monique and Bogdan, who cloned their beloved, dead terrier Achilles. Now they have three very expensive, identical terriers—Thetis, Apollo, and Zeus—that don't match their original dog's personality at all. Because Zeus is still a puppy and trainable, Fielder has the brilliant idea to exactly reproduce the apartment the couple lived in when they raised Achilles, complete with three sets of 'Fielder Method' actors portraying them 24/7. His theory is that if they raise Zeus in those same dynamics, perhaps they could nurture the puppy to be a physical and behavioral clone of their original pet. Despite the laugh-out-loud inducing lengths Fielder, the couple, and their very dedicated faux selves go to emulate the life and issues the couple experienced back in the day—like fights about being ready to have a baby, or Monique recreating the kind of diabetic attacks Achilles would help wake her from—Zeus doesn't respond as hoped. However, several weeks into the daily immersion, Zeus suddenly copies how the family cats and Achilles walked across the back of the couch—and it's like Fielder has brought about the second coming. Monique and Bogdan are genuinely delighted to see such a specific behavior that harkens back to their preferred pet, and that scrap is all Fielder needs to take the experiment to the next level. The only pilot that Fielder is aware of bucking the pilot/co-pilot communication curse is Captain Chesley Burnett 'Sully' Sullenberger III, the hero pilot of Flight 1549 who saved his passengers and crew by safely landing in the Hudson River. At the time, the cockpit recorder captured Sully inviting his co-pilot to give him feedback at a critical moment, and while he didn't, they all survived that harrowing crash. Fielder connects the dots assuming that if he could apply the Zeus nurturing experiment to how Sullenberger describes he was raised in his memoir, maybe he could find a way to raise future pilots in the same way and make this aviation problem vanish forever. When Nathan Fielder tells you what you're about to see next 'is going to seem weird,' that should make you pause. And the man delivers as he shaves his body and gets a bald cap professionally placed so he can 'live' Sully's life from an infant to that fateful flight over New York City. Yes, he is going to put himself through the experiment because 'if a personality transfer can work on a dog, maybe it could work on a human being.' But he has to put himself through it first before he can ask it of someone else. Watching a bald, freshly shorn Fielder navigate a nursery built to scale to make it seem like he's the size of a baby may be peak comedy to some, but in my estimation it was actually the lowest hanging fruit comedy of the season. Fielder getting his nappy changed, or drowning while breastfeeding is too obvious for his kind of elevated comedy stylings. The bit only finds its groove when he shares a frame with a series of freakishly elongated puppets who tend to him as stand-ins for Mr. and Mrs. Sullenberger. They are creatively bizarre and perfect for the surreal nature of this whole digression. Then the highlights from Sully's adult life has Fielder donning the pilot's famous mustache and grey-white hair so he can dissect the memoir with such specificity that it's like he's trying to find the secrets within the Zapruder film. Fielder gets so granular that he micro focuses on Sully's inability to express his feelings in the manuscript until the passing of his emotionally-distant father. Fielder is genuinely bothered by the pilot never admitting to crying, and his repeated hollow mantra of finding ways to 'cope' with no expressed methods to do so. But it all comes together at his fake bar when another pilot tells him that their kind don't talk about their feelings because if they needed help and it got back to the FAA, their medical certificate would be revoked and they'd be grounded. With that knowledge, Fielder is able to find the subtext in Sully's book when he pinpoints that the pilot never once references any music until after his father dies, which is just months before the first Apple iPod is released. Afterwards, Sully brings up the band Evanescence and their song 'Bring Me To Life' often. Fielder surmises that the song's lyrics taught the pilot to ask for help just in time for his fateful flight. And then he makes a persuasive case to prove that theory by pointing out that there's a 23-second pause in the flight recording which is the exact length of the song's chorus. Also, Sully's iPod was found submerged in the cabin. The magic of Fielder is that for all the ridiculous material that came before this hypothesis, he connects the evidential pieces together so well. By stitching together the things unsaid in Sully's memoir, with a cockpit reenactment that feels like it was poached right from Eastwood's Sully movie and the mic drop revelation that his pilot volunteers have all been the most responsive and personally candid about sharing their personal woes, Fielder has seemingly discovered that pilot repression is really a thing. That he did it by wearing a diaper and getting a dog clone to walk a couch back, is pure Nathan Fielder. And what he does with that knowledge going forward, I can't even imagine. Stray observations • The episode opens with Michelle and Bogdan watching President Obama breaking into programming to announce the death of Osama Bin Laden, which happened on May 2, 2011. Then, she quickly switches channels to watch the Royal Wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton which occurred on Friday, 29 April 2011. A TiVo at play, or is this a Fielder trap? • Michelle and Bogdan are Greek mythology nerds! Achilles, their 'everything to us' dog is named after the Greek hero who was a mortal warrior and a demigod. His clones are named Thetis after his sea goddess mother, Zeus (who is the king of the gods), and Apollo (who is Achilles' adversary). • Nathan deadpanned that it was 'easy to match' the air in San Jose by actually having someone vacuum capture air in the town and then drive it 300-plus miles down to Los Angeles to have a human being blow it in the face of Zeus during his walks. I almost fell off my couch laughing. • Did you catch the 'vintage' Jared Fogle Subway ad at the bus stop? • Just how many pilot mixers did Nathan host at his imported airport bar? • I don't think I've ever witnessed Fielder as close to breaking as he was with Jeff the pilot explaining his 'no T-girls' mandate in his dating app bios. His genuine bemusement was a sight to see. • Fielder starts the episode by shifting his 'unproven testing' to animals for safety and then makes himself the subject of his 'weird' Sullenberger immersion experiment. Yet both he and Zeus poop themselves on-camera. Extract from that what you will. • The earnest score played while Fielder's 'living' highlights from Sullenberger's memoir was pure cinema. • Those terrifying, child perspective puppets around young Sully were made by the fine craftspeople at L.A.'s Viva La Puppet. • Check out the New Invention booth at the fake terminal. More from A.V. Club
