Nathan Fielder is kind of spooky. From the meta corporate satire of “Dumb Starbucks,” an ingenious viral stunt from his mid-2010s Comedy Central show Nathan for You, to the passive house as mirror for the soul in his first narrative series, Showtime’s The Curse, Fielder has a sixth sense for finding the right absurd metaphor to fit every moment. But never before has he anticipated the zeitgeist in as literal a sense as he does in the second season of The Rehearsal, the docu-comedy whose original 2022 run confirmed his warped genius. This follow up to that astonishing debut, which kept expanding and folding in on itself until it had reframed all of life as a succession of nested performances, sends Fielder on a quest to improve aviation safety.
He couldn’t have known, when conceiving it, that air-travel disasters would become a recurring theme of the early Trump 47 era, as the White House blamed DEI for a deadly midair collision between a passenger jet and an Army helicopter, before laying off hundreds of Federal Aviation Administration workers. You don’t have to be clairvoyant, though, to connect our precarious era to the terrifying experience of trying to land an imperiled plane with a questionable captain. More grounded (so to speak) and less philosophically ambitious than its predecessor—but still consistently unique and funny and strange and profound—the second season of The Rehearsal, premiering April 20 on HBO, trains its focus on the cockpit, whose occupants are entrusted with dozens to hundreds of lives. In dissecting the relationship between captain and first officer, Fielder crafts a subtle analogy for another topic of escalating urgency: challenging authority.
In its initial incarnation, before Season 1 got so thrillingly messy, The Rehearsal billed itself as an attempt to repurpose the social-engineering methods Fielder devised to pull off the remarkable manipulations of Nathan for You, in order…
