The Rehearsal Season 2 Is About So Much More Than Aviation Safety

Nathan Fielder is kind of spooky. From the meta corporate satire of “Dumb Starbucks,” an ingenious viral stunt from his mid-2010s Comedy Central show Nathan for You, to the passive house as mirror for the soul in his first narrative series, Showtime’s The Curse, Fielder has a sixth sense for finding the right absurd metaphor to fit every moment. But never before has he anticipated the zeitgeist in as literal a sense as he does in the second season of The Rehearsal, the docu-comedy whose original 2022 run confirmed his warped genius. This follow up to that astonishing debut, which kept expanding and folding in on itself until it had reframed all of life as a succession of nested performances, sends Fielder on a quest to improve aviation safety.

He couldn’t have known, when conceiving it, that air-travel disasters would become a recurring theme of the early Trump 47 era, as the White House blamed DEI for a deadly midair collision between a passenger jet and an Army helicopter, before laying off hundreds of Federal Aviation Administration workers. You don’t have to be clairvoyant, though, to connect our precarious era to the terrifying experience of trying to land an imperiled plane with a questionable captain. More grounded (so to speak) and less philosophically ambitious than its predecessor—but still consistently unique and funny and strange and profound—the second season of The Rehearsal, premiering April 20 on HBO, trains its focus on the cockpit, whose occupants are entrusted with dozens to hundreds of lives. In dissecting the relationship between captain and first officer, Fielder crafts a subtle analogy for another topic of escalating urgency: challenging authority.

In its initial incarnation, before Season 1 got so thrillingly messy, The Rehearsal billed itself as an attempt to repurpose the social-engineering methods Fielder devised to pull off the remarkable manipulations of Nathan for You, in order to help regular people “rehearse” for tough situations in their own lives. One guy wanted to come clean with friends he’d been lying to for years. A woman who couldn’t decide whether to have kids rehearsed parenthood. If you take it at face value—rarely the right choice in Fielder’s world—Season 2 is driven by the creator’s own obsession with what he sees as an overlooked problem in commercial aviation. After poring over transcripts from the cockpits of planes that crashed, he has concluded that many of these tragedies could have been avoided with better communication between captain and first officer.

As Fielder explains, co-pilots often seem to defer to superiors making poor choices, failing to take control of the aircraft even when doing so could prevent mass fatalities. So it stands to reason that first officers should be empowered to speak up and captains open to feedback. That’s where the Fielder magic comes in. Piles of HBO money is thrown at this cause; the crew constructs a flight simulator, an airport set, even a Congressional hearing room for elaborate roleplay scenarios. Actors trained in Season 1’s Fielder Method shadow (some might say “stalk”) aviation employees as they traverse the globe. Real pilots are recruited to discuss their frustrations and participate in simulations. All the while, Fielder frets over whether he, a comedian with a reputation for humiliating people that dates back to Nathan for You, can get anyone to take him seriously on an issue he really cares about. A circus clown occasionally wanders into the frame, silently mocking him with the implication that they two are the same.

The show remains at its stickiest when, as though in response to critics who called Nathan for You cruel, it’s mucking around in Fielder’s own psyche. That bizarre subjectivity remains largely inscrutable to viewers despite many apparent insights, thanks to our awareness that The Rehearsal is his creation—one whose ratio of authenticity to artifice only he can fully know. A quasi-digression on the autistic community’s embrace of The Rehearsal blurs the line between neurotypicality and neurodivergence. In an episode that’s bound to cause chatter, Fielder sets up a ridiculous rehearsal to help him confront Paramount+ about the removal of a Nathan for You episode it judged to be controversial, preferably without ruining his chances of getting The Curse renewed (its network, Showtime, has the same parent company). A running theme is his worry that the show can’t work as a vehicle for positive change without sacrificing entertainment value, but when he turns the camera on himself, Fielder is always both funny and fascinating.

Yet beyond the self-referential humor (callbacks to Season 1 gags, like the deeply awkward laptop harness, abound) and even the mission to make aviation safer, The Rehearsal’s second season functions as a metaphor for a universal problem. A first officer who’s too intimidated to challenge a captain’s suicidal choices isn’t much different from a regular person, or a nation of them, so afraid to confront authority that their silence dooms them. What Fielder and his pilots are really rehearsing is good citizenship in the midst of an epochal emergency. Towards the end of the season, he explains to a potential ally: “It’s hard for us to be the people we ideally want to be in every situation.” But practice helps. As we fly into turbulence, our best selves balking just when they should be seizing the controls, maybe it isn’t just pilots who could use a rehearsal.