Nathan Fielder Achieves Levels of Cringe We Don’t Even Have Words for Yet in Season Two of ‘The Rehearsal’

There are TV fans who consider The Office a delightful cringe comedy, given the way Michael Scott’s obliviously strange antics make the people around him feel awkward. Those people probably wouldn’t survive any episode of a show created by and starring Nathan Fielder. On his Comedy Central series Nathan for You, Fielder “helps” small businesses with outlandish proposals, like having a computer repair operation promote its hiring of asexual technicians to ensure that they didn’t peek through customers’ racier files. In The Curse, Fielder plays a New Mexico gentrifier/aspiring HGTV star whose life already has a number of serious challenges even before a little girl curses him for taking back a $100 tip from her. In The Rehearsal, Fielder tries to prepare ordinary people for big decisions or tough conversations by having them practice in environments that provide an absurd level of verisimilitude; Fielder’s deadpan attitude is so fixed that even his ostensible beneficiaries can find him off-putting. 

Nearly three years after the first season of The Rehearsal, the show returns to HBO April 20th. And when I say it brings together Nathan Fielder and aviation safety, that’s either going to be extremely appealing to you, or something you never want to glimpse even by accident. 

The Rehearsal’s Season One poster depicts Fielder at a dinner table, surrounded by humanoid figures of a woman and a couple of kids; a dog statue leers at him from the bottom left corner. Whether this representation of the season’s story is more or less unsettling than what actually occurs is a matter of opinion. The last five of the season’s episodes revolve around Angela, a woman trying to decide whether she should become a parent. To this end, Fielder and his team set up an immersive environment that will replicate the conditions Angela says she would want to have in place before becoming a mother. The production rents her a large house in rural Oregon where she can “homestead,” and casts a number of babies, children and teens to play her “son” Adam in succession, as the character gets three years older every couple of weeks. 

Angela soon discovers how difficult and tiring single parenthood can be and ramps up her search for a partner to share in the work. When Robbin, the one candidate she finds, gives up in the middle of his first night with Adam, Fielder volunteers to co-parent with Angela, to help figure out whether he wants to be a parent himself. After Remy, a 6-year-old Adam who doesn’t have a father at home, gets overly attached to his “daddy,” it sends Fielder into a crisis; he then tries to rehearse his time with Remy retroactively, to see if there was a way he could have avoided causing Remy pain in the end. 

How real is Fielder’s resolution? Probably as real or fake as any other part of the show. 

Whereas Season One is about resolving a deeply personal question, Season Two is about public policy. Fielder tells us he’s been researching commercial airline crashes; his findings show several instances in which a first officer seemed to have concerns about the captain’s decisions, but didn’t voice them. What Fielder wants to accomplish this season is to change the way the FAA trains pilots, so that first officers feel more comfortable speaking up, and captains are more receptive to feedback. He has an ally in John Goglia, a former director of the NTSB who recommended role-playing exercises for pilots during his tenure, which the FAA refused to implement. 

Fielder attacks the problem of poor communication from a variety of angles. Co-pilot Moody has a long-distance girlfriend he clearly suspects of cheating on him, but just as clearly doesn’t want to ask her about it out of fear that it’s true. Would that conversation flow more smoothly if she dressed as a pilot and they talked in a replica cockpit? Delivering criticism is hard: Could co-pilots practice by screening aspiring reality show contestants and letting failed auditioners down easy? 

Fielder readily admits that rehearsing high-pressure interactions is something he likes to do, but is there a deeper reason he feels driven or perhaps compelled to do it? Clones, stilt walkers, Congressional testimony, the band Evanescence and exploiting a major loophole in FAA regulations all come into play; I’m not supposed to spoil major surprises, but I think I’m safe assuring Season One fans that the replica Alligator Lounge — re-christened Nate’s Lizard Lounge — still has a central role to play.

As I wrote a couple of years ago in a review of Jury Duty, the series premiere of The Rehearsal was a deeply unpleasant viewing experience for me. It revolves around Kor Skeet, who has sought Fielder’s help preparing to confess to Tricia, a longtime trivia teammate, that while he had told her he has a Master’s degree, he actually doesn’t, so she should stop sending him listings for jobs that require that level of education. 

Kor comes across as socially awkward and insecure, but so does Tricia. When she meets, under false pretenses, with the actor Fielder has hired to observe Tricia so that the actor can play her later, Tricia is so self-involved that she spends most of the time she’s supposed to be interviewing a supposed bird-watcher that her monologue has to be montaged; fake Tricia’s performance of arriving at the rehearsal for Kor’s confession and gushing petty complaints about her terrible day is eerily accurate to the real Tricia’s when the time for the real confession comes. I know Kor and Tricia are both adults who signed releases to participate in the show, but gawking at their social discomfort feels cruel.

But, of course, that’s assuming we’re seeing what Kor and Tricia are really like in their day-to-day lives, and not that the “real” Kor and Tricia are also performing, if not performers. The Rehearsal layers on so many levels of abstraction that any degree of artifice or authenticity is theoretically possible. So as I continued with the series to prepare for Season Two, I either became less anxious about the show’s “real” construction, or watching 12 episodes in a sitting broke down my natural defenses and rewired my brain. 

The first season either is or presents itself as increasingly transparent: We see hidden-camera footage of Angela breaking character with various Adams, chatting about the actors’ real lives and careers; Fielder’s real parents show up when he’s rehearsing raising Adam with the deeply Christian Angela and urge him not to neglect his fake child’s Jewish education. No plot element feels harder to feign, however, than Remy’s confusion about his new daddy, and Fielder seems to genuinely regret upsetting a child who, after all, wasn’t capable of consenting to participate in the show. But Remy’s mother Amber does promise Fielder that she’ll make sure Remy’s okay in the long run, and the knots Fielder ties himself in over it reveal what feels like the hidden truth of child performers’ lives that we’ve all just agreed not to acknowledge most of the time.

Where Season One’s parenting experiment came across as loose and improvisational (though, again, I’m sure it actually wasn’t), Season Two feels more carefully structured, with each episode offering a different kind of evidence for Fielder’s overarching thesis that pilots need to communicate more freely. The Rehearsal’s ongoing deconstruction of unscripted TV takes it into new sub-genres, like competition shows about performing or romance. In Season One, Fielder himself took a while to become a major performer on-screen; he takes center stage in Season Two’s third episode with a deeply researched look into the mind of a pilot. The fifth episode shows Fielder engaging with some of the critical responses to the show in a way that (if real) is extremely vulnerable. And the finale episode, more than any other, will test viewers’ capacity to believe that what they’re seeing really happened as it’s portrayed. The tension can feel so unbearable that you think Fielder’s trying to kill you, and then you’re reminded that it’s quite the opposite: he’s literally trying to keep you and every other potential airline passenger alive. 

Fielder’s work isn’t for everyone. This isn’t setup/punchline comedy. If you find yourself barking with laughter, it’s probably because you feel physically compelled to make a noise to interrupt the silence of an impossibly awkward, impossibly long moment. It finds depths of cringe we don’t even have words for yet. 

The Rehearsal took its conceit pretty far in Season One; Season Two shows that, for Fielder, the sky is the limit.