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The second season of The Rehearsal immediately surpasses the first by tackling bigger issues. In the previous season, Nathan Fielder applied his methodology—known as the Fielder Method, which involves role-playing in complex simulations—to situations where the participants’ contributions were primarily emotional and intimately personal. The new season opens with a powerful moment: a simulated plane crash that underscores Fielder’s central point. He examined the black box transcripts of plane crashes and observed that, although co-pilots are equally responsible for the safety of flights, they often dare not voice their concerns to captains—and that pilots often suppress the doubts and suggestions of those who do speak up. Fielder believes that his method can help improve the training of both pilots and co-pilots, allowing the former to share power and the latter to assert themselves.
The show immediately sets the stakes high and places new demands on Fielder himself, who wryly muses on the “trust deficit” he must overcome as a comedian in a field where lives are at stake. Some of the first season’s flaws still show; despite the inherent charm of Fielder’s conceptual approach and his ingenuity in manipulation, his cool, investigative eye remains as coldly entomological as ever, and the underlying cruelty of his methods remains as blunt. But the second episode of the new season makes a significant shift that, much to my surprise, feels invigorating: he dives deep into his own experience to find a resonant empathy.
Early in his career, as a junior producer on Canadian Idol, Fielder found himself having to say no to many singers who auditioned. Recalling how he hated rejecting singers as much as they hated being rejected, he stages a role-playing simulation of the process, using co-pilots as talent evaluators because, he says, “The Holy Grail I was looking for was a method of rejection that kept everyone happy.” When one co-pilot, Mara’D, achieves the results Fielder seeks, he tries to figure out how to make her abilities, which one rejected singer attributes to her “general aura,” replicable and teachable. The singer is skeptical that this is possible, but in a voiceover, Fielder articulates his philosophy: “I disagree with that notion. I believe that any human quality can be learned, or at least imitated.” This time, however, Fielder himself becomes the subject of his experiments: recalling a recent conflict when he did not dare to stand up to authority, he rehearses an attempt to do so in the present tense.
The controversy concerns the removal of an episode of his earlier show, Nathan for You, from the Paramount+ platform — the famous episode in which, in order to draw attention to an outerwear company that glorified a Holocaust denier, he launches his own clothing line aimed at supporting and educating about the Holocaust. (Fielder’s proposed storefront includes swastikas and a model of Auschwitz — exactly the kind of ridiculous faux-cheekiness I didn’t like about that show.) Now, in “The Rehearsal,” he’s doubling down: After learning that Paramount+ Germany was the first to pull an episode in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Israel, Fielder fakes a showdown with his boss — and does so by depicting the company’s headquarters as Nazi. The mockery is briefly complicated when the actor playing the German leader (whom Fielder has dressed in a Nazi uniform) breaks character to challenge him, calling him “insincere, just a man with a grudge who uses his TV show to denigrate us instead of trying to understand us.” But Fielder’s show of pushing hot buttons he doesn’t actually risk pushing obscures what’s at the core of the episode’s interest: his doubts about acting and reality, appearance and being, as they relate to the empathy Mara’D displays and his own inability to do the same.
While Fielder has maintained that everything can be “learned, or at least imitated,” his staged confrontation on Paramount+ leads him to suggest that “some people are born great performers,” whose authentic feelings come “easily,” while “for the rest of us, no matter how sincere we are inside, it’s always going to be a struggle.” This dichotomy becomes central to the third episode, “The Pilot’s Code,” and he approaches it with a deft maneuver: After modestly admitting that he’s nervous about conducting some of his psychological experiments on pilots, he tests one on an animal. Finding a dog recently cloned from another, Fielder attempts to imbue it with the personality of the original by replicating the physical and emotional conditions of the first dog’s early existence, and succeeds. This becomes the springboard from which Fielder leaps into the sublime. And then there’s the first act of “Rehearsal,” which is something
Sourse: newyorker.com
