“The Rehearsal” gets more ambitious—and less funny

Centering “The Rehearsal” is the ongoing punchline that every elaborate, unnecessary vision Nathan Fielder places before us is the result of HBO allegedly giving the actor carte blanche to do whatever he wants. In its first season, under the guise of helping a teacher come clean to his bar trivia team about a lie, Nathan constructs a detailed replica of the bar where he and his subject endlessly role-play as many possible turns an upcoming awkward conversation could take. 

In the case of a woman deciding whether to have kids, he rents a house in rural Oregon and hires an assortment of child actors pretending to be her son. But it isn’t simply the monetary cost that makes people snicker. It’s invasiveness Nathan pours into his exploits. Like Fielder’s long-ago Comedy Central series “Nathan For You,” every effort to solve a problem for the sake of the greater good ends up being about Nathan. The woman’s curiosity about parenting becomes his, and eventually, one of the young actors can’t understand why Nathan can’t actually be his father. 

“The Rehearsal” is named for its star’s insistence on planning for every variable in life, down to the way he greets someone. “A happy outcome doesn’t have to be left to chance,” Fielder’s character, whom we’ll refer to as Nathan, proposes in the opening season. Nothing in life (or this show) is ever so straightforward. The only guarantee is that each season’s extensive setups will pay off in a series of grand messes.

This second round escalates Fielder’s ambitions while heightening the absurdity of the performer’s inquiries. Now Nathan focuses on aviation safety, a risky topic considering recent plane crashes and near misses. A later episode clarifies that Fielder’s been working on this angle for several years; even if that weren’t the case, we can see why he’d select this little-considered subject as a launching point to stranger destinations.

Nathan prefers to gain insights by observing how others interact, or fail to, which he pinpoints as a major problem. After examining a slew of famous plane crashes, he concludes that a lack of rapport between pilots and co-pilots contributed to many, noting several turns where co-pilots failed to assert themselves for fear of losing their jobs. 

Simulations opening the season are presented with complete seriousness, each ending with their actors collapsing as footage of flames projects on the walls surrounding their fake cockpit.

Smack in the middle of each conflagration, observing everything with feigned disinterest, is Nathan. His artificial cockpit is a laboratory, and he’s a citizen scientist who employs the cabin’s close quarters to see how far his subjects allow him to push them.

You have to love this man. That’s no joke. The layers-on-layers model Fielder pioneered over his career relies on an audience hungry for his extravagant brand of humor. But that presumed familiarity constructs a major weakness into this second season, in that many stretches are geared more toward spectacle than getting a laugh. 

“The Rehearsal” (John P. Johnson/HBO)

“The Rehearsal” nods toward that possibility in the premiere after Nathan takes his entirely serious-sounding proposal to John Goglia, who formerly served on the National Transportation Safety Board and sees potential in his project. Whether Goglia is in on the joke or convinced this comic wanted to improve aviation safety is as much of a mystery as what this season is trying to achieve. 

“I was given this money to create a comedy series. So far, I was failing,” Nathan says in his deadpan voiceover. “We were over 10 minutes into this episode with zero laughs. And therein lies my dilemma. I was both the best and worst person to solve this problem.”

Nathan presses onward, nevertheless, recruiting pilots and actors to shadow them. The show’s production designers erect a detailed replica airport terminal down to a fake Panda Express, purely for the sake of placing participants in an approximation of their natural habitat so their repartee will be more honest.  

Nathan coaxes a few captains and co-captains to serve as judges for a singing competition show purely to observe how each handles delivering unpleasant news. 

Spending time with his subjects and their doubles ignites more questions requiring Nathan to build out, quite literally, scenarios he hadn’t previously considered. Is this show a set designer’s dream or nightmare? Hard to say, since Nathan’s odd musing leads him to engage entirely new subjects, employ more actors, and render additional full-scale recreations of homes and living rooms. 

“The Rehearsal” (John P. Johnson/HBO)

Eventually, he grapples with the concept of antisemitism and his Jewish identity by recreating one of his recent memories, complete with an actor playing him, for an entirely preposterous reason. Almost always, we see him peering at other performers through fake windows like a peeping Tom, or wandering nearby, laptop harnessed to his torso. HBO has a history of rewarding auteurs with ample resources and limited creative oversight, yielding mixed results over the years. We should and have noted that this problem is almost entirely limited to male creatives. There are already plenty of barriers preventing women from rising to that status, thus, they face fewer such critiques.  

The latest arc of “The Rehearsal” is nowhere as egregious as past prestige TV time wasters sold on the strength of their creators’ brand names. Rather, its branched-off farce becomes the star’s creative adversary, chopping up his comedic flow. At his sharpest, Fielder’s Nathan makes a viewer want to curl up in a corner even as they’re laughing. But the second season’s broader excursions sprawl beyond his control, with jokes dragging far beyond the zone of discomfort into blank boredom.

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Part of what makes the show click despite its flaws is Fielder’s serious dedication to his form. Knowing he’s burning through a premium cable channel’s budget on ridiculous schemes is good for a few laughs by itself, along with the ramrod straightness of Nathan’s demeanor, at first. He might linger for a moment amid flaming fake debris to ponder the severity of what he’s agreed to take on. Then, and just as suddenly, the scene may cut to a clown. 

Certain devices lead nowhere, like the show within a show Nathan promotes as real and therefore decides to see through to its conclusion, just because. Other moments lean more heavily into experimental theater or performance art than comedy, as when he makes a whole-body leap into the life of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger requiring, yes, more sets – and at this point, puppeteering. Beyond the usual weirdness that is Fielder’s stock-in-trade, those sequences hold an impressive beauty. 

You can watch them and conclude he’s made true art, much as he did with his fake gallery show in the 2014 “Nathan For You” episode that made him famous, “Dumb Starbucks.” If you’ve been watching Fielder since then, you may find whatever he does to be funny, including his mere presence. That could be enough to keep “The Rehearsal” in the air through a finale that is legitimately riveting while leaving us to debate what it is that we’re supposed to be laughing at. 

Season 2 of “The Rehearsal” premieres at 10:30 p.m. Sunday on HBO and streams on Max.