The Rehearsal Season-Premiere Recap: Up in the Air

About halfway through this first episode of the second season of The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder sits down to make an important phone call. It’s his learned hypothesis that the cause of many airplane crashes is a breakdown in communication between the captain and the co-pilot. Based on the black-box transcripts of downed flights, the root of the problem is the difficulty co-pilots have in asserting themselves in situations when the captain’s decision-making needs to be questioned or even overruled. Fielder wants to use the significant resources at his disposal to improve that relationship, so he brings on Moody, a young first officer for United Airlines he found on LinkedIn. One immediate problem is that he can’t access the private room for pilots at the airport — or, indeed, anything past security — so he calls United’s media-relations department for help.

“We’re really trying to make a somewhat sincere effort to explore and develop new ways to improve pilot communication in the cockpit,” he explains to the United representative on the other line. Hearing the expected response on the other end, he continues, “I only say ‘somewhat’ because it’s a television show, and we’re trying to make it entertaining.” You could call it a documentary, but Fielder, the mastermind behind Nathan for You, The Curse, and this show’s first season, says that he would “use that term loosely.” All in all, it seems like a productive conversation, so Fielder walks down the hall to another room and tells the actress playing the United Airlines media person that he’s ready to do the real thing. She’s seated in what looks like a reasonable facsimile of a United employee’s office.

And out goes the rug. So if this season of The Rehearsal is like last season’s or any other Fielder shows, enough of them will get pulled to make you wonder if there’s any floor underneath that gigantic pile of rugs.

For as well-schooled as Fielder is in how documentaries or reality shows operate, The Rehearsal is like two different movies rolled into one: The first is Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York, in which a dramatist (Philip Seymour Hoffman) takes money from MacArthur Fellowship grant and takes on a theatrical project that starts in a warehouse and keeps building endlessly upon itself, with more layers and scaffolding. The second is Albert Brooks’s debut feature, Real Life, a parody of the landmark PBS documentary An American Family in which Brooks plays a film director who tries to turn the lives of an ordinary family from suburban Phoenix into a Hollywood movie. It’s like a precursor to The Truman Show that anticipates all the clichés and artifice of reality TV, which was the primary target of Nathan for You and a related target here. Fielder wants to show you all its silly nonsense by pulling a bunch of silly nonsense — and yet, at the same time, squeeze out some actual profundity. It’s a neat trick.

The project in this season of The Rehearsal — or at least the project as it exists right now, given how far season one strayed from anything that happened in the beginning — is airline safety. The wonderfully unexpected opening sequence takes us inside a cockpit where the co-pilot’s warnings of discrepancies in the plane’s navigation system go unheeded by the captain, who steers them into a simulated fiery crash. Standing mirthlessly between the flames and the cockpit window is Fielder, looking suitably concerned. With sample disasters like this one in mind, Fielder heads to the Aviation Technology Complex for a lecture that John Goglia is giving to students about his experience at the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Strike that: Fielder is attending a lecture he has actively invited Goglia to give to pitch him on the idea of being on his weird HBO show. “When you’re trying to involve a serious man in your comedy series,” he narrates, “it’s best to take things slow.”

With Goglia around to give his project legitimacy — much like the team of scientists that Brooks’s character gathers together for Real Life — Fielder casts Moody and tries to understand, at a hilariously granular level, what makes this Houston-based regional co-pilot tick. In a hotel pre-flight, he watches Moody brush his teeth, iron his uniform, and struggle mightily to find the release to close the ironing board. He asks about pre-flight routines like what he eats, which is usually grilled teriyaki chicken with white rice from Panda Express, the most healthy of unhealthy airport meal options. Yet when the two arrive at the airport in Houston, Fielder cannot access the private sanctum of the pilot’s lounge, much less any part of the airport past security. And so he does what anyone would do: construct an exact replica of Moody’s terminal in Houston, including that Panda Express, across three interconnected warehouses in Los Angeles. Rarely has Warner Bros. Discovery money been better spent.

The fourth episode last season introduced “The Fielder Method,” and it’s a small, funny joke that Fielder just assumes is well-known enough not to need further explanation. So I’ll give it to you: The Fielder Method involves an actor stalking a real person, called a “primary,” to learn how they behave. It’s basically like Method acting, but with Fielder’s signature stilted creepiness. Here he flies over 70 actors to Houston to stalk pilots, crew members, and random airport staff so they can replicate Moody’s everyday experience as closely as possible. It’s hard to choose which performance is funniest, but the payoff of an actor asking a real Panda Express employee if they “have any specials” and then later telling Moody they “have no special today” at the fake Panda Express may win by a nose.

The one major insight that Fielder does glean in this episode — and one that’s semi-serious and sneakily profound, as moments in his shows often are — is the connection between the co-pilot/captain relationship and other human relationships with different stakes. Moody has a long-distance relationship with his girlfriend but worries about her finding someone new and more appealing, like a customer at the Starbucks where she works. Yet he can’t bring himself to talk to her about it. Fielder seizes on the analogy: “It seemed like Moody felt the trajectory of this relationship was outside of his control, without recognizing that he was the co-pilot here. But maybe his communication style was different on the job.”

We don’t know yet, and we may never find out. The Rehearsal, in the Fielder way, is already building out into unexpected places, like the scaffolding in Synecdoche, New York. He sticks Moody and his girlfriend in the cockpit so they can talk about their issues, which may or may not give Moody the answers he seeks, but at least encourages him to speak up for himself in a relationship that he currently doesn’t control. “Maybe this is something the FAA never considered,” Fielder muses over the narration. “You could use the emotions from pilots’ personal relationships to train them for the cockpit.” At a time where people are understandably anxious about stepping onto a plane, maybe Fielder can save a few lives here.

Scene Work

• Among the montage of various dramatized flight crashes, the standout is the captain in Missouri who talks about how you “gotta have fun” before musing over his hankering for a Philly cheesesteak and an iced tea. “I can’t see shit,” says his co-pilot. “Cuz you’re a bitch,” he replies.

• An extremely understated pitch from Fielder to John Goflia: “I do have some experience with creating elaborate role-playing scenarios. And I do have money to put towards this.”

• “So far I was failing. We were over ten minutes into this episode with zero laughs. And therein lies my dilemma: I was both the best and worst person to solve this dilemma.” Cut away to: a clown stuck under a van, futilely honking his horn for help.

• Fielder’s sudden neurosis about his own shortcomings as a creative captain leads to a hilariously awkward exchange of niceties with an actor playing a pilot. When the man tells him he’s from Nebraska, Fielder draws deep from his well of Nebraska knowledge: “Omaha … is a city.”

• “Maybe the answers I was seeking weren’t in Moody’s airport. They were in Moody’s heart.”

• There’s great meme potential in any Fielder show, but how about his posture when he curls up on Moody’s bed and listens intently to his relationship problems? Surely something can be done with that.

• Noting that early attempts at flight were mocked, Fielder ends with this fine observation: “Maybe every new idea is funny until it’s proven. Maybe a clown can change the world after all.”