Plenty of TV shows explore social anxiety; The Rehearsal might be the first show that’s ever made me feel social anxiety toward the medium of television itself. In its brilliant, frustrating second season, Nathan Fielder’s quasi-comic, quasi-reality show unfolded with such intense reserve that I barely stopped to ask myself whether I liked it; I was too busy worrying whether it liked me. Was I watching it in the right way? Did it want me to think about it differently? Did it … did it find me boring? Was it secretly making fun of me all along?
After Sunday night’s finale, I’m still not sure. The episode illustrates all the brain-spiraling paradoxes of the series, which questions whether sincerity can exist in human beings, but it does so without quite telling you whether it wants to be sincere itself. The premise of the season is that Fielder, the famous comedian, has conducted an independent investigation into a series of fatal air crashes. He’s determined that the biggest contributing factor is social awkwardness: Copilots are afraid to challenge their captains and thus sit by silently while their lead pilots make catastrophic, preventable errors. Fielder’s ostensible mission, then, is to use the techniques he honed in The Rehearsal’s first season, which asked whether people could overcome social anxiety by “rehearsing” difficult encounters ahead of time, to help copilots learn to speak up.
By the time the finale starts, Fielder’s quest to revolutionize air safety has led him on a surreal odyssey, the surreality of which has mostly been imposed by Fielder himself. In one episode, he decides that if he wants to win a congressional hearing for his ideas, the logical first step is to revive Canadian Idol as a singing competition hosted by pilots. In another, an experiment with cloned dogs convinces him to put on a diaper and shave off all his body hair in an attempt to relive the babyhood of the renowned pilot Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger. But now, in the last episode, he introduces a development that’s seemingly more straightforward in its connection to the season’s theme: Fielder himself has recently gotten his pilot’s license, and he’s been training to fly commercial airline jets. His goal now, he says, is to complete a full flight in a 737 and record his interactions with his copilot. Only this, he insists, can compel Congress to act.
The Rehearsal has always been obsessed with dioramas, full-scale models, and worlds within worlds; it spends much of its time in a gigantic sound stage full of elaborate copies of real-world environments (an airport concourse, a bar, a congressional committee room). Its most memorable images often involve Fielder lurking in the background of these spaces, wearing a voyeuristic frown as he watches actors perform scenarios he’s devised for them. (In one memorable passage from Season 2, he hires dozens of actors to follow a pilot around and copy his every move; the result is a strangely beautiful ballet of social discomfort.) Now, however, the diorama and the real world are merging into one: The jet will be another sound stage of sorts—all the passengers are actors, given lines to speak ahead of time—but it's also a real jet, flying through the real sky. If everything is as it seems, Fielder will have hundreds of lives in his hands.
Is everything as it seems? Well, it seems to be. The flight takes off. It looks real. Without spoiling too much, I can say that there’s no late reveal indicating that the whole thing was an elaborate stunt. Instead, there’s a late sequence in which Fielder declares that he’s working with a program dedicated to repurposing out-of-service commercial jets. This leads to a montage in which we see Fielder at various airfields around the world, ticking off checkboxes on a clipboard before flying the planes to their new destinations. It's hard to believe that Fielder really spends his time this way when he’s not making TV shows, and that implausibility makes the notion that he’s really a licensed commercial pilot seem kind of suspect, but who knows?
If you’ve seen the now-legendary “Dumb Starbucks” episode of Nathan for You, Fielder's beloved Comedy Central series, you know he’s always loved gonzo stunts, and the 737 flight is one of his best. It combines several of The Rehearsal’s underlying preoccupations into a single narrative arc. There’s Fielder’s slightly creepy-seeming desire to be in control. There’s his equally creepy-seeming attraction to scenarios that combine care and exploitation. And then there’s his comic determination to go to extreme lengths for seemingly ludicrous motives, a determination that both sets up The Rehearsal’s main plotlines and makes its tone strangely hard to describe. What I mean by that is that the tone of the series seldom seems to emerge naturally from the action on-screen; describing what happens makes the show sound zanier than it really is. In fact, the vibe is austere. The music is dour and repetitive. The lighting is clinical. Fielder’s voice-overs are deadpan to the point of sounding pained. For long stretches, the show isn’t particularly funny, and I don’t get the sense that it’s trying to be.
Rather, Fielder seems to be using the paraphernalia of comedy to put his viewers in the same position of anxious uncertainty that he and his characters constantly experience. Life is unpredictable, other people are hard to understand, and rejection hurts; these are the core human crises that The Rehearsal seemingly wants to save us from, but it has a strange way of making us feel them more intensely rather than less, as if the audience itself were another diorama to be filled with Fielder’s anxieties. Even when the events on the screen suggest that we’ve arrived at some sort of comfort or resolution, the mood remains unsettling. The undertow of the show’s formal paradoxes is hard to escape, and (paradoxically!) it’s hardest to escape in the moments when the show is telling us we’ve finally broken free.
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What the show actually seems to be exploring, then, is a crisis of human self-knowledge. Fielder loves to chronicle the ways in which his rehearsal scenarios, designed to make life more manageable, inevitably lead to their own unmanageable consequences. The singing competition that’s intended to help copilots learn to offer criticism instead becomes a chance for Fielder, who notices that the contestants seem to find him off-putting, to obsess over his own likability; human chaos always creeps back into scenarios designed to control it. But if there’s no distinction between rehearsing for life and living life, how can we tell the difference between authenticity and performance? (“I’ve always felt sincerity is overrated,” Fielder says in a deadpan voice-over during Season 2. “It just ends up punishing those who can’t perform it as well as others.”) And if we can’t tell the difference between authenticity and performance, then how do we know who we are?
One possible answer, of course, is through metaphor, and maybe the most obvious reading of Season 2—maybe even the best reading of Season 2—is as a sort of messy allegory. We’re all pilots in our own lives, trying not to crash; we’re all copilots in other people’s lives, trying to figure out how to talk to them. Our imaginations, like The Rehearsal’s sound stages, endlessly rerun the same fantasy scenarios in an attempt to direct their outcomes. Our lives are populated by actors who keep going off-script. We try to escape into consequence-free alternate realities (e.g., the internet), and those realities preoccupy more and more of our minds (e.g., the internet), and then they turn out not to be consequence-free at all (e.g., the internet).
At the same time, so much of The Rehearsal seems unreal—presumably, Fielder doesn’t actually want to write aviation safety policy?—that it’s hard to know whether even the symbolism can be taken at face value. So much of the experience of watching the show comes down to the question of what you think it all means, but what it all means changes depending on what you think you’re watching. A scene that looks compassionate when viewed from one angle (we’re helping a socially awkward pilot find a girlfriend) quickly becomes cruel when viewed from another (we’re forcing a socially awkward pilot to endure hours of humiliation for HBO subscribers' entertainment) and cynical when viewed from a third (the socially awkward pilot was an actor; we tricked you into thinking any of this was real). And the show itself is so tonally aloof, so reluctant to offer any guidance as to how it wants to be read, that you’re basically on your own with it. If we’re all pilots, we’re flying this route without a map.
Which means, of course, that we end up watching The Rehearsal with the same sort of half-excruciating fascination we might feel for a cool stranger we met at a party. We can’t read its mind. It doesn’t tell us what it wants. We’d like to live up to its expectations for us, but we can’t be sure what they are. Watching Nathan Fielder perform Nathan Fielder has turned us into the Nathan Fielder of interpreting Nathan Fielder.
About midway through Season 2, there’s a plot twist that adds yet another new dimension to these considerations. Fielder, after failing to secure a congressional hearing for his plan to improve aircraft safety, notices something intriguing: Season 1 of The Rehearsal has been embraced by the online autistic community. Though Fielder says in a voice-over that this wasn’t his intention, the show’s depiction of rehearsal as a strategy for navigating social interaction has struck a chord with some neurodivergent people, many of whom use similar strategies in real life. (This much is real—the show really does have a strong fan base among autistic people—though the moody montage of Fielder “discovering” this fact while browsing on his laptop is surely not.) He wonders if he can use his standing in autistic circles to finagle a hearing in Washington, D.C. (There is no way he actually wonders this.) He goes to talk to the director of an autism center. As if offhandedly, she shows him a test used to diagnose autism. He tries the first two questions, and his answers suggest that—as his fans have sometimes speculated—he might be autistic himself.
Now, at least to me, all this felt totally staged, as if Fielder were nodding to online fan commentary while coyly refusing to confirm or deny the speculation. And whenever autism is mentioned in later episodes, it’s in the same gentle, teasing spirit. Still, the idea that The Rehearsal is expressing a neurodivergent worldview at least hovers somewhere in the background. And while the human problems the show explores transcend any diagnostic category—boringly neurotypical myself, I will nevertheless put my ability to shut down during social encounters next to anyone’s—there’s still a lovely possibility here. What if the show seems so aloof and hard to read to me only because it’s exploring a genuinely different way of experiencing the world?
If that’s the case, I’m not sure why it has to be so cagey about its intentions, but then, when it comes to The Rehearsal, I’m really not sure about much. It’s fitting, for a show this caught up in self-referential loops, that the most concise review of Season 2 probably comes from Season 2 itself. “I don’t know what it means,” Fielder says in a voice-over at the end of Episode 3. “But it’s interesting.”
