The Rehearsal Season 2 blew me away. The second season of Nathan Fielder’s deranged HBO show takes all of the kooky inventions of Season 1 — elaborate recreations of real places, psychologically intense role-playing, reality-bending storytelling — and applies them to a very serious issue. This time around, Fielder isn’t toying with awkward human encounters for emotional reasons, but to prevent future aviation disasters. It’s a concept that shouldn’t be funny. It shouldn’t be entertaining. It shouldn’t be profoundly emotionally moving. Nevertheless, The Rehearsal Season 2 is all of these things and more, thanks wholly to the mad genius its creator, director, and star, Nathan Fielder.
The Rehearsal first arrived on HBO back in 2022 as Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder’s twisted deep dive into human relationships. Fielder had previously been best known for his beloved Comedy Central series, Nathan For You, in which he concocted elaborate schemes to help failing businesses thrive. The Rehearsal took Fielder’s penchant for complex “prank-like” social experiments and made them, well, more social. Season 1 began as Fielder’s attempt to help others navigate anxiety-inducing social interactions by allowing them to “rehearse” them. As the first season went on, however, it soon became a meditation on Fielder’s own ambivalent feelings towards romantic relationships, domesticity, parenthood, and Judaism.
The Rehearsal Season 1 was lauded for its sheer creativity. It seemed like an impossible concept to pull off in the first place, much less recreate for a second season. The Rehearsal Season 2, however, improves, expands, and even hones in on everything that audiences loved about Fielder’s first outing. It’s still nutty, still tense, and still stupidly hilarious.
The Rehearsal Season 2 kicks off with a strangely noble intent: Nathan Fielder wants to use the methodology he created in Season 1 to study and prevent aviation disasters. As he tells former National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia, he’s combed over countless transcripts pulled from the black boxes of doomed planes. Fielder has zeroed in the one thing all of these aviation disasters share in common. Namely, there’s a moment where a timid first officer fails to take over for a flailing captain. Fielder believes that if there was a way to get pilots comfortable with communicating better, future catastrophes could be avoided. He even points out Goglia’s own recommendation for the problem, role-playing exercises, and offers his show’s assistance.
From the jump, Fielder wrestles with the tonal dissonance of what he’s doing. He is trying to solve a serious real world problem within the framework of an HBO-produced comedy series. The Rehearsal‘s Season 1 premiere is essentially a meditation on this, climaxing with Fielder watching a staged scenario of people laughing at a clown in pain, before realizing something’s wrong. Later in the season, it’s Fielder’s reluctant exploration of another serious topic he’s associated with that transforms The Rehearsal into a modern masterpiece of self-reflection.
Before we get that far, though, The Rehearsal Season 2 plays something like “Nathan Fielder’s Greatest Hits.” He casts actors trained in Season 1’s “Fielder Method” to shadow real life people once more and attempt surreal new concepts. We get a return of Fielder stalking sets with a laptop harness and misreading social cues from women. In Episode 2, Nathan For You fans might be shocked to discover one of the best episodes has taken on new meaning in Fielder’s life. Watching actors describe how they tackle love scenes gives us a detour where Fielder brings up his unnerving work opposite Emma Stone on The Curse.
The Rehearsal Season 2 is sure to spark many of the giggles that Season 1 became known for. In fact there’s one whole episode where I was probably wheezing with laughter watching how far Fielder was willing to go for his latest social experiment. However, when I finished The Rehearsal Season 2, I felt as though Fielder had done something he’s never managed before. He opened up.
Critics who found his Season 1 antics to be anti-social might be stunned to discover how badly Fielder wants to harness his unique skill sets to help others in The Rehearsal Season 2. His methodology might be mad, but his heart genuinely seems to be in the right place. Then again, with Fielder, you never can tell what’s real life and what’s just the rehearsal. Either way, The Rehearsal Season 2 has real heart and real genius.
The Rehearsal Season 2 premieres on Sunday, April 20.