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Season two of the Rehearsal opens in a cockpit, where the atmosphere is almost unbearably strained. With the plane apparently on a collision course (“we have those hills to the right of the airport, remember?!”), the co-pilot begins to panic, but the captain haughtily dismisses his colleague’s concerns. Sure enough, the plane begins to plummet, before crashing into a fiery wreck. We zoom out to reveal a set, where Nathan Fielder stares and blinks into the camera gormlessly, having conducted this horrifying performance – one of many reconstructions of real-life disasters to come.
This is, of course, the comedian’s totally wild docuseries, in which he prepares people for big life events via elaborate (and occasionally unethical) walk-throughs. The first season culminated in Fielder possibly causing untold psychological damage to a child actor who was only too happy to accept him as his real dad (he apparently hadn’t grasped the extent to which he was part of an intricate plan to help a woman who wasn’t sure whether she wanted to have kids).
This time around, Fielder tells us that he has decided not to involve any children. But if you’re expecting something a little less problematic, you’re in the wrong place. In fact, at the end of the finale (which aired in the US over the weekend), I realised that all I had written for the final 30 minutes was “how on EARTH did they do this????” over and over again, like a bad version of the typewriter scene in The Shining.
Indeed, there is much here that will remind you of a horror film, and many scenes you will surely watch with your fingers over your eyes. Which is hilarious, given that the premise of this season is so incredibly mundane.
Fielder has theorised – largely through careful study of thousands of pages of dry government documents – that plane crashes are directly linked to a lack of communication between pilots and first officers. His new quest, he says, is to improve aviation safety by forensically analysing how those conversations unfold and how pilots can give one another better feedback. And, er, by creating his own replica of Houston airport.
Of course, as he explains to the pilots, actors and experts whom he inveigles into the rehearsal, HBO will only open its chequebook if his potentially life-saving, industry-leading experiment is also a comedy. Cue another six episodes of wondering just how much anyone knows at any one time, as Fielder constructs another televisual hall of mirrors where the fake and the real collide with all the violence of his staged plane crashes.
As with season one, the producers have managed to find civilians who are so uniquely awkward that they feel like integral parts of the chaos. These are people who blur the line between committed normie and aspiring actor so well that many have, in fact, been accused of being fake. But they are all real, from baby-faced first officer Moody, who is convinced his girlfriend is cheating on him with her customers at Starbucks, to Jeff, an older pilot who freely, maybe even proudly, admits that he has been banned from all known dating apps. As always, Fielder gets in way too deep with everyone – not least a lovely young man named Colin, who gets his own rehearsal-within-the-rehearsal about his faltering love life.
It’s one of many, many tangents in a series that also touches on dog cloning; Evanescence’s gothy rap-rock hit Bring Me to Life; neurodiversity and mental health; and a fake singing contest called Wings of Voice, which led one contestant, Lana Love, to give a tell-all interview to Variety where she angrily stated that she had “signed up to be a singer, not a lab rat”.
These strands weave around one another as the supposed goal of improving aviation safety comes in and out of focus. There are frequent links back to Fielder’s previous work, on shows such as Nathan for You and The Curse, which only makes the whole thing more meta. It does at times feel a little overwhelming, even for a man whose whole thing is essentially artful self-absorption.
And yet, navel-gazing and the many ethical questions raised here aside, Fielder pulls it off spectacularly. He shows impressive commitment to the bit in episode three, where he undergoes a physical transformation that is as horrifying as it is sublime. And the last episode sees the end justify the means, as he channels all he has learned into a knockout conclusion. The Rehearsal is frequently plane-crash TV – but my oh my, does it stick the landing.
