The Rehearsal Is the TV Event of the Decade

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There is a special, unique, and increasingly rare thrill in watching a television series where week-to-week, you have absolutely no idea what you’re in for—a show that dares to defy the formula and familiarity built into TV’s DNA. Back in 2022, Nathan Fielder achieved this feat in the first season of his HBO series The Rehearsal, in which Fielder confronted his longstanding fascinations with the inherent artifice behind human interactions and behaviour, breaking through the fourth wall only to invite the audience to watch him reconstruct it—and then dared us to see how thoroughly we could pinpoint, in the aftermath, what was real and what was theater. Only the Real Fielder Heads (those of us with taste) could truly find it funny but everyone who watched found it compelling—all the way up to a finale that pulled the rug out, tying together grander themes of identity and soul-searching that had been in play the whole time underneath the surface of Fielder’s play-acting schemes.

That first season was so effective, and felt so complete, that it left many viewers—or at least this viewer—wondering where a second season could possibly go. An early-April trailer drop that hinted at a season focused on air-traffic control and flight safety, only left us all more confused—and also bewildered, since the already eerily emotionally-attuned comedian’s years-in-the-making project appeared to be addressing a hyper-current news phenomenon.

Now that we’re about halfway through The Rehearsal’s sophomore season, it’s clear that Fielder hasn’t just lived up to the first season—he’s found a higher gear and is doing career-best work. The Rehearsal may go down as the TV event of the year, maybe of the decade. Although I have press screeners for the whole season, I’m writing this having only watched up through last night’s episode—but when you’ve just seen Nathan Fielder spend weeks cosplaying as Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger only to emerge with a real, credibly psychoanalyzed thesis about how the legendary pilot actually saved the day on the fateful flight that made him a household name, I’m ready to say I’ve seen enough to call it. I don’t know what I’m watching, but I know it’s genius.

The funniest thing about all of this is that if you squint hard enough, all of the scenarios on The Rehearsal so far this season—the Twitter-timeline catnip, I-can’t-believe-he-went-there rabbit holes he’s gone down—are also some of Fielder’s most contrived work. If the show’s mission is really to figure out how and why improved communication between airline pilots can lead to less downed flights, there was no actual good reason to rope an eager first officer’s blatantly wayward relationship into the mix as “research.” The connection that Fielder draws in episode two from pilot social interaction to his own real beef with Paramount over an old episode of Nathan For You is tenuous at best. And I couldn’t really tell you why this week’s installment finds him fixated on Sully. But it hardly matters when the material generated by these leaps of logic is so jaw-dropping.