This Is Your Captain

Nathan Fielder keeps getting away with it in the second season of The Rehearsal.

This piece contains spoilers for the first and second seasons of The Rehearsal.

I wanted to show that here is a man who has all the signs of paranoia and megalomania, exhibitionism and social maladjustment and who can still be fairly well controlled and healthy, and indeed, of apparently greater productivity by acting them out than if he would have tried to constrain and resolve his symptoms… The only way to get rid of the "God syndrome" is to act it out.

—J.L. Moreno, Who Shall Survive? Foundations of Sociometry, Group Psychotherapy and Sociodrama, 1953

The first thing to keep in mind is that Nathan Fielder is an actor. As Hamlet said, that means his task is to hold the mirror up to nature, which is not to be confused with showing things as they are (a mirror, after all, gets everything back to front). What he’s called upon to do, both in his acting and his art generally, is both trickier and more achievable: to show us something we can recognise as we’ve never seen it in the past. Another word for this is “estrangement,” often associated with “baring the device”—a technique employed continuously in his semi-documentary comedy series The Rehearsal, which has just reached the end of its second season on HBO (Max here in Australia).

The second thing is that Fielder is an auteur, in a sense still not so common in US television (Fielder is Canadian but based in the US, and in all his later work is his own primary or sole director). Perhaps he even gains something from bypassing the big screen: in The Rehearsal, what’s made strange first and foremost is the act of filmmaking. Provided you have the budget, there’s nothing so unusual about building a set modelled on an actual bar in Brooklyn, as Fielder’s team do in The Rehearsal’s first season: it’s little different from what Hitchcock did when he had his production design team model the courtyard in Rear Window after an apartment block in Greenwich Village. Likewise, when Fielder recruits non-professional performers to enact vignettes inspired by their own lives, this resembles what many filmmakers have done in the name of “realism”—and when he has both professionals and non-professionals repeat the same scenes over and over with variations, he’s engaged in what is known as “directing”.

Even outside the realm of cinema, there’s nothing strictly new about the initial premise of The Rehearsal, which sees Fielder offering members of the public the chance to “rehearse” for potentially difficult moments in their lives, simulated with as much literal accuracy as is possible in advance. At face value, it’s one more variant on the notion of drama as therapy which has been around at least since the mid-1910s, when the Romanian-born psychiatrist J.L. Moreno started testing out his theories of “psychodrama” on groups of sex workers in Vienna (some of these same ideas would later be channelled into his experimental Theatre of Spontaneity, where the ensemble included the young Peter Lorre). Long-term aficionados of reality TV, or the plays of Pirandello, may likewise feel there’s relatively little here they haven’t seen before —but again, the estrangement effect springs from the way everything is presented as if no-one had thought of it till now.

That might suggest we’re dealing with a naive artist, which we are, although the naivety belongs not to the actual Nathan Fielder, the creator of the show, but to the character of the same name he plays on camera, who we’ll refer to for convenience as “Nathan”. These two are under no circumstances to be confused, even if Fielder sometimes tempts us to do so, and even if they look identical and say and do nearly all the same things (this is the third thing it’s necessary to keep in mind). The fundamental difference is that Nathan lacks a sense of humour, although in some respects he’s a nicer guy: he may be a control freak, even a megalomaniac, but he means well. He wants to help people, and is prepared to go to any lengths to do so, as we learned in his earlier TV vehicle Nathan For You, which revolved around him befriending hapless Los Angeles small business owners and coaxing them into going along with his out-of-the-box marketing ideas.

Nathan like Fielder is blessed with an imagination, but unlike Fielder he doesn’t quite realise it: consciously he’s a letter-of-the-law man, whose flights of fancy are typically born of efforts to exploit a legal loophole or fulfil an obligation at minimal cost. For instance, there was the time that Nathan persuaded the owner of an electronics store to sell TVs for a dollar, the catch being that customers first had to lay their hands on the TVs, which were stashed in a tiny room at the back of the store guarded by an alligator. More genuinely inventive was his plan to offer horse-riding lessons to obese people, attaching helium balloons to their arms to reduce the weight…

But to single out especially memorable brainwaves does no justice to the ruthless logic of Nathan For You, whereby the glaring flaw in any given scheme is addressed with another, still more evidently flawed scheme, and so ad infinitum, or rather until whoever Nathan is dealing with runs out of patience, by which point the allegedly real world in which they’re both operating has begun to resemble a kingdom of alarming nonsense after the fashion of Michel Gondry or Donald Barthelme (look up Barthelme’s brightly malignant “Some Of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby,” and imagine Nathan as the one in charge). Judging by what behind-the-scenes reports have leaked out, some of Fielder’s dupes weren’t too thrilled when they caught on, while others saw the joke right away but went along for the sake of the free publicity, or for fun. Others perhaps never did quite fathom the distinction between Nathan, the eager-beaver do-gooder, and Fielder, the trickster behind the mask. Some critics have struggled with this too, which may be part of Fielder’s intention, although what he himself wants from any of this is anyone’s guess. To amuse us, it would seem. But perhaps to amuse himself first of all.

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In recent years Fielder’s full head of hair has turned dust-grey, allowing him to present an appearance which from some angles could almost be called “distinguished”. But little has changed about his soft childish face with its expression of respectful concern, as if he had just checked some figures on a clipboard and couldn’t get them to add up. He still looks like he could be somebody’s intern, which is what he banks on, since it ensures that no-one will suspect a hidden agenda, or give him much thought of any variety till it’s too late. Teachers will recognise his laborious, politely insistent manner of speaking: the voice of the pupil who believes he deserves an A because he followed all the rules, even if he couldn’t always see why they were needed.

This brilliant characterisation was given unprecedented scope in the first season of The Rehearsal, more ambitious but also more genuinely freeform than anything that had preceded it in Fielder’s career. Initially we were led to believe the show would follow the Nathan For You formula, with Nathan as a roving guardian angel helping out someone new each week—but most of the season wound up focusing on a woman named Angela, a born-again Christian with a range of additional paranoid beliefs, unsure if she wanted to become a mother and for some reason willing to let Nathan help her make up her mind (to describe her as susceptible to manipulation would not be wrong, though she pushed back far more than most of Nathan’s scene partners do). By way of assistance, Nathan set her up in a house in rural Oregon with several young boys taking turns to portray her imaginary son Adam, a workaround to circumvent child labour laws. When her boyfriend understandably ran out of patience, Nathan himself took on the role of baby daddy, by which point it was clear that the journey we were taking wasn’t the one we thought we’d embarked upon, any more than it likely was for Angela herself, setting aside the question of how much of any of this was real (or “real”).

Even with Nathan insisting on camera that his religious faith was no more than nominal, it’s not hard to understand why at least one critic understood the show’s spiralling narrative as springing from the tenets of Jewish mysticism: “Fielder as director as God, manifesting the contractions of the boundless.” (“The genesis of the Godhead was closely related to the genesis of psychodrama,” Moreno wrote in 1953.) Strange to say, none of this was really so far from the mainstream, recalling not just the fantasies about simulated worlds that have proliferated on US TV in recent decades, but a family sitcom of the most traditional sort, with Nathan as the wacky patriarch forcing his obsessions on those nearest to hand. On other levels again, the show could be understood as a satire of the artistic impulse as necessarily rooted in obsessional neurosis—and equally as a defence of this impulse, amoral as its promptings might appear.

“Life’s better with surprises,” was the closest the season came to a thesis statement that summarised all this, along with the line that followed soon after, “Let’s go play.” Both were delivered at the literal last minute by Nathan as part of a final “rehearsal” involving him and a tearful young boy, one of the show’s many Adams (making a child cry as part of your art project might be the very definition of a dick move, but with his zest for moral discomfort Fielder was willing to go there not just once but repeatedly, on this occasion with the get-out clause that both he and the boy had explicitly assumed identities not their own). On one level this was Nathan belatedly acknowledging the limits of control, a familiar moral lesson for the audience to take away with them; on another, it was Fielder reminding us how dull the world might be if it weren’t for him and his fellow tricksters.

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The first Rehearsal was among the masterpieces of the age, enough all on its own to establish Fielder as one of the great screen clowns, comparable as a poker-faced daredevil only to Buster Keaton (what Keaton was to physics and engineering, Fielder is to psychology and the other soft sciences). The second season isn’t the same kind of masterpiece, and never could have been: originally Fielder and his team were free to reinvent the show as they went along, whereas a baseline set of expectations are now firmly in place. Perhaps as a consequence, all pretence of spontaneity has been abandoned: everything in this new season is designed to prepare us for the jaw-dropping finale, explicitly said to have been in the works for years.

The first hint of what we might be in for is the cold open, a credibly-acted exchange between two grimly stoic pilots in a plane about to crash (their dialogue is taken from an actual black-box recording, or so we’ll gather later on). On impact both are killed, or at least knocked unconscious—and then the camera swivels to show us Nathan, a half-silhouetted figure visible at a distance through the plane’s windshield, a wall of flame behind him, his expression pensive rather than alarmed. A wide shot reveals the layout of the studio where the crash sequence was filmed, with Nathan standing in front of a high-definition LED screen, a technique we’ll see used often in the episodes to come. As a forecast of the future it’s as enigmatic as it is ominous, but the immediate meanings are clear: we’re reminded how easily The Rehearsal itself could crash and burn, and on a separate level asked to envisage its auteur as a demonic figure orchestrating catastrophe (Angela, back in the first season, did accuse him of being a tool of Satan).

No-one could have anticipated that the entire second season of The Rehearsal would be devoted to the hero’s efforts to improve aviation safety, but if Nathan thought like the rest of us he wouldn’t be Nathan, and the implications get richer with each episode, even as we’re kept guessing about what lesson the parable is meant to teach. Part of what we’re invited to marvel at is how much can be spun out of one small insight: that plane crashes occur because pilot and co-pilot fail to communicate effectively, due both to the entrenched hierarchy in place and the fact that pilots tend to be solitary, stubborn types. This is what Nathan loves, a problem to be solved: could these barriers be broken down using unorthodox methods, which happen to be the only methods he knows? Could it be that a man experienced in large-scale role-play exercises, who also studies air crashes as a hobby, might possess the exact skill-set needed to save lives?

The argument might be more persuasive if it wasn’t being broached in the context of a comedy show, and if the show in question hadn’t started out by darkly hinting about where these particular good intentions might lead. Still, compared to much of Fielder’s past trolling, what he’s putting forward is not an intrinsically foolish idea: his pitch is plausible enough to win the approval of his new sidekick John Goglia, a well-respected aviation specialist in his late seventies. Indeed, it’s too plausible to be particularly funny, not that plane crashes anyhow are exactly comedy gold, which is the ongoing meta-joke. What laughs exist tend to be the spasmodic kind, forced out of us when the awkwardness grows unbearable—although Fielder does what he can to balance conceptual rigour with whimsy, while Nathan concentrates on supplying the precise quotient of entertainment value needed to satisfy his unseen bosses at HBO.

It isn’t that either’s well of ingenuity has run dry, although some of the stunts are rather too much the kind of thing we’re used to seeing Nathan do. There’s On Wings Of Voice, the singing competition he organises with pilots as judges, to test their skill at delivering bad news. There’s the Gondry-style interlude where he undertakes to relive the formative life experiences of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the hero of the Hudson, from infancy onward, which naturally means lying in a giant crib and suckling from a papier-maché breast. More significantly, there’s the segment where he denounces Paramount Plus for censoring an episode of Nathan For You that allegedly made light of the Holocaust. Here for once Fielder appears to be expressing his own views with little room for irony—till Nathan’s attempt to rehearse for a potential confrontation with the studio sees him rebuked in turn by his scene partner for “pretending to want feedback”. Supposedly improvised, this thematically crucial exchange was almost certainly devised by Fielder and his writing team in advance, which only adds another turn of the screw.

Threaded through all this is the joke the show started from, that Fielder behaves exactly like a filmmaker while also being, in reality, a filmmaker. Again, we see him holding auditions and ordering the construction of realistic sets (everyone is wowed when they first enter the show’s replica of the interior of Houston Airport, though it’s nowhere near as elaborate as the JFK Airport set where Steven Spielberg shot most of The Terminal). To some unknowable degree, Fielder’s acting may be a similar double bluff, whereby he assumes the role of “Nathan Fielder” as an excuse to behave like himself. Still, it’s faintly jarring to be reminded that Nathan and Fielder have all the same achievements to their names—including co-creating, directing and starring in the 2023 satirical comedy-drama The Curse alongside the two-time Oscar-winner Emma Stone, although Nathan insists the experience taught him nothing about acting.

Some devices are more easily bared than others: it’s understandable that Fielder’s co-writers and other major creative collaborators on The Rehearsal are acknowledged only in the end credits, since incorporating them into the show’s narrative would necessarily complicate our image of Nathan as a solitary eccentric. Still, the new episodes do make a point of repeatedly acknowledging The Curse, leading me to theorise as I watched that its existence would be revealed as part of a typical Nathan scheme to make his mark in the realm of prestige TV, shifting his image away from comedy and thus encouraging members of Congress to take his ideas about aviation safety seriously. That precise revelation didn’t come about, but when you’re watching a show in which a famous comic portrays an outwardly identical famous comic in the process of making a show identical to the one you’re watching, it’s not surprising if your own imagination starts playing tricks.

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Is the second season of The Rehearsal about Joe Biden? That was another stray thought which crossed my mind, around the time of the Sully segment: the white-haired, straight-backed Sully even looks a bit like Biden (and was a Biden supporter). It’s plausible that writing on the show would have been in progress in the middle of 2024, when Biden was resisting the suggestion he step aside as the Democratic nominee; had he listened to his co-pilot, perhaps the country wouldn’t be going down in flames while the show was in post-production (whatever is literally true in The Rehearsal or isn’t, there’s little doubt that much of its narrative is created in the edit room). Obviously, this is one possible allegorical interpretation among others: wherever you look, it’s not hard to find pilots who would gain from listening more closely to their subordinates, and co-pilots who are hesitant to speak up. But the cap does seem to fit.

The catch, already noted above, is that Fielder had the second season and its narrative destination in mind from much earlier: specifically, from January 2023, which is reportedly when he enrolled in flight school. Two years on, he emerged as a certified commercial pilot (the latter part of his training was conducted largely in flight simulators: apparently the norm, but yet another of the show’s neat ironies). Despite having far less experience in the air than any full-time professional, it would seem that by February 2025 he possessed the minimum qualification legally required to fly a rented Boeing 747 out of San Bernardino airport, circle round and land it back on the runway, with a co-pilot by his side and 150-odd actors on board. (Paying customers would have been out of the question, but as Nathan learns earlier in the season, actors are a breed apart; they can do things barred to most of us, such as canoodling with people they aren’t in a relationship with.) All this is assuming that Fielder pulled off the stunt for real rather than faking it in a studio, which after-the-fact reports appear to confirm; as for how he got away with it, presumably HBO can afford some excellent lawyers.

Once you factor in how far ahead of time Fielder had to commit himself, any topical resonance looks less likely to be intentional. Still, it’s not unreasonable to interpret the season as a commentary on leadership in general, with the final stunt forcing the question of how Fielder is handling his own position of power. Is he playing with people’s lives? No doubt about it, though that’s been his modus operandi from day one, and those who boarded his plane at least knew what they were getting into (thankfully, no children were involved). Physically rather than legally, how much of a risk was he running? That’s for the experts to decide; it was safe enough for the insurance companies, which is all any layperson can say with certainty. To get away with exposing everyone including himself to serious danger, Fielder would have to be an unusually persuasive lunatic; then again, persuasive lunatics do exist, and the entertainment industry is not the least likely place for them to be lurking. And it’s not as if he hasn’t spent his whole career teaching himself how to convince people to go along with dubious plans…

One other potentially relevant piece of data is that The Rehearsal is a comedy show, which tells us that the climax is meant to be not just confounding and suspenseful but also funny. The punchline comes in two or three parts, the first of them comparatively straightforward: in theory, the purpose of the stunt is to show how much safer air travel would be if pilots were better listeners (Nathan seems to be thinking of the flight as one more “rehearsal,” conducted in a setting so realistic the only difference from regular reality is that TV cameras are present). Yet the more we hear about what he has in mind, the more it sounds dangerous in its own right. That, clearly, is how Fielder wants us to feel—but supposing the whole plan truly was a reckless error of judgement on Fielder’s part, which based on the available information is not impossible, we have little basis for certainty that anyone on or off camera could be counted on to stand up and tell him so, or that he would have listened to them if they had.

The second punchline is more complicated, harking back to the preceding episode, where Nathan googles himself and learns that since the premiere of the first season of The Rehearsal he’s become especially popular in the autistic community (naturally, the sites he’s browsing are all authentic; it feels a bit like the second part of Don Quixote, where the characters have all read part one). Being Nathan, he’s quick to ponder how he can capitalise on this special form of fame, while indignantly rejecting any hint he himself might be other than neurotypical. In the finale, the subject crops up again: prior to his big day, Nathan has to fill out a form confirming he’s fit to fly. That leads to a visit to a psychiatrist, where he reluctantly agrees to a brain scan that will pick up numerous neurological conditions including autism (we learn in passing that pilots commonly avoid such tests, since the wrong diagnosis might rob them of their livelihood). Straight after, he learns it’s all been for nothing: he won’t get the results until after the flight is scheduled, so he’ll have to go ahead on the assumption he’s fine.

Nathan may be thrown off course by this development, but once again it’s more than likely Fielder and his writers had the whole thing mapped out in advance, to the point where this particular narrative thread feels more fictional than not, even if what we’re seeing is footage of a genuine medical consultation. The giveaway is the blatant artifice of the larger design, again revealing Nathan as an unreliable narrator whose stated intentions are belied by his acts. While the flight is still in progress, he participates in yet another role-play exercise, taking on the persona of one Captain Allears, who loves getting feedback from his co-pilot. But after all, this was only a character he was playing: given a hero’s welcome back on the ground, he chooses to dismiss any potential diagnosis as irrelevant to whoever he is or wants to be.

The point here is not whether we as viewers imagine the Nathan character to be autistic (as for the real Fielder’s neurological makeup, the show offers no insight into this whatever). Nor are we obliged to see Nathan’s choice to set aside the results of the scan as misguided in itself. But the presentation of this as a personal victory carries a very definite irony in the context of the preceding six episodes, which have centred on the character’s quest to encourage people to listen to what others are telling them, most especially when the news might not be welcome. The kicker comes in the concluding account of his subsequent aviation adventures, where the satirical intent finally becomes unambiguous, or almost. “They only let the smartest and best people fly a plane of this size,” he muses, sounding like no-one so much as the current US troll-in-chief. The voiceover could have been scripted at any time up to the last minute, and the echo is surely too apt not to be intended—though if Fielder is the man I imagine he is, we’ll never know.

It was not as much what I told them, the tale itself, it was the act, the atmosphere of mystery, the paradox, the becoming real of the unreal. I was in the center, often I moved up from the foot of the tree and sat higher on a branch: the children formed a circle, a second behind the first, a third behind the second, many concentric circles, the sky was the limit.

—J.L. Moreno, Who Shall Survive?