There’s nothing fairly just like the Nathan Fielder stare. These chilly, lifeless eyes, the expressionless face, his tall, lanky physique standing immobile in body as he watches with fascination the unusual, typically merciless experiments he inflicts on folks. In “Nathan For You,” it was used to delightfully pranky impact; in “The Rehearsal,” it’s virtually his deadliest weapon.
The primary season of his newest present took his ambitions to grasp (and, in some methods, conquer) the human situation to hilariously outsized ranges: constructing a photorealistic bar so a topic might observe a tough dialog along with his trivia buddy, or fast-tracking the expertise of fatherhood with an escalating sequence of actors enjoying his potential baby at completely different ages. With the second season of “The Rehearsal,” Fielder chooses to use “The Fielder Technique” to a way more altruistic aim: fixing the epidemic of airplane accidents.
Fielder couldn’t have recognized how much this issue would crash (sorry) to the front of our public consciousness in the previous few months. However that’s a part of the weird prophecy of his work, and the merciless timing that makes this new batch of six episodes as gasp-inducingly hilarious as it’s unusually poignant.
The season’s opening minutes are one in all its best rugpulls: Two pilots, approaching a touchdown, the co-pilot nervously noticing their navigation is off however unable, for no matter cause, to inform the rigid captain. Alarms go off, panic units in, flames engulf the cockpit. Then, the digital camera pans, and there’s Fielder, standing as if floating within the sky in entrance of the airliner, surrounded by flames, like a vengeful, playful god. With that Stare.
It’s a sublime transfer that Fielder (who additionally directs all six episodes) employs to right away set us within the metafictional play at work in “The Rehearsal,” and the structural dilemma he toys with this season. He’s developed a knack for these sorts of stylish playacting eventualities, establishing elaborate settings that folks can use to “rehearse” doubtlessly uncomfortable conditions to allow them to account for each attainable variable. However as he’s grown ever extra obsessive about aircraft crashes, he thinks he can use the Technique to handle what he sees as the best subject plaguing these crashes: lack of communication and rapport between pilot and copilot.
From there, “The Rehearsal” travels down a rabbit-hole of social anthropology, making an attempt to resolve the issue that plagues pilots particularly about talking up within the cockpit. And in so doing, he concocts probably the most convoluted, impressively elaborate (and wasteful of HBO’s bottomless pocketbook) conditions wherein to observe them.
It’s a journey that, in traditional Fielder style, takes many twists and turns, even inside a single episode. A chapter that begins with finding out cloned canine may simply finish with a Kaufman-esque deep dive into the life and memoir of Sully Sullenberger, in an try to relive a lifetime of experiences that led to his lifesaving determination to land his aircraft within the Hudson. It’s one in all Fielder’s most Brechtian strikes, and simply the season’s spotlight.
However, simply as with the earlier season, Fielder tries to grasp different folks’s issues by understanding himself higher, and season two takes that to even larger private heights. The Fielder Technique, in any case, is one thing that makes him extra snug present on the planet, and “The Rehearsal” is, if nothing else, a solipsistic train. Fielder is aware of this, and the present’s elegant writing lets him stroll that delicate tightrope between lampooning his personal self-importance and forging a extra full understanding of himself by forensically finding out the folks round him. He needs to save lots of lives; that’s for certain. However he’s hoping that he will be the one to do it, and in so doing, discover some piece of himself that’s lacking.
The grand joke, after all, is that Fielder doesn’t assume a bit of himself is lacking, and what he does in “The Rehearsal” is simply what all people does after they put together for a social interplay, proper? However each transfer to assist one in all his topics can also be a method for him to map the human situation, and the entire little social pressures we have now to navigate. It’s a transfer that’s led the present to be celebrated by autism awareness activists for precisely mapping the processes of masking and finding out social cues to slot in, which turns into a curiously self-reflective pressure within the new season as properly.
It’s onerous to elucidate the lengths Fielder travels to resolve the dual issues of aircraft crashes and his personal psyche on this newest season with out simply giving freely the entire twists and turns. It will be folly to take action, and remarkably disrespectful to you, the viewer, and Fielder/HBO. However I can say that the scope of this season is staggering: a comedy present that tries to resolve main societal issues and likewise feels so self-reflexive of its creator in brutally trustworthy methods.
Fielder is aware of the very concept of him taking this journey is absurd, and by no means fairly offers up the sport of how a lot of a gag he’s taking this to be. The reply, it appears, is someplace within the center, and that dissonance is what retains “The Rehearsal” flying excessive as one of many funniest, most insightful exhibits on tv. “Possibly each new concept is humorous till it’s confirmed,” he muses in regards to the historical past of flight, and his grand experiment. “Possibly a clown can change the world in any case.”
Complete season screened for evaluation. Premieres April 20 on HBO.
