Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal returns, with too much of a good thing | Canada Voices

Since so much of the pleasure of a Nathan Fielder show comes from the unexpected ways his comic acorns grow into giant oaks, it would be unfair to reveal too many specifics about the second season of his docu-comedy The Rehearsal. But the statute of limitations has surely passed for his breakthrough series Nathan for You (2013-2017), so I’ll tell you about an episode midway through its run that, for me, still represents one of Fielder’s creative pinnacles.

The conceit of that series was that Fielder, who at some point in his distant past earned a business degree, would generate comically elaborate schemes to boost struggling small businesses. In an episode titled “Smokers Allowed,” the business was a bar whose customer base dwindled after anti-smoking legislation. Discovering that actors on a stage could still legally smoke indoors, Fielder installed a row of theatre seats in the bar, thereby rendering the entire bar a theatrical performance. That’s a funny idea, and Fielder took it further, quickly deciding to stage one entire night at the bar as an actual play, hiring dozens of actors to re-enact surveillance footage on a replica set.

Since then, grand comic experiments have become expected of Fielder, and he has continually upped the ante. At one point during the new season of The Rehearsal, Fielder builds five exact replicas of a man’s apartment on a Hollywood sound stage, hires five sets of actors to play the man and a woman that the man hopes to romance, and instructs them to improvise different possible variations of the real-life couple’s hypothetical date. Would you believe that, in the grand scheme of the show, this amounts to little more than a throwaway gag? This is an experiment that makes even “Smokers Allowed” seem modest – but bigger doesn’t necessarily mean better.

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In The Rehearsal, Fielder has moved on from small businesses to interpersonal problems. His ostensible subject this time is aviation safety (a good first joke, since who wants to watch a comedy show about that?). Studying black box recordings recovered from plane crashes, Fielder discovers that the disasters were usually preceded by friction between pilots. His hypothesis: What if the craft of acting (or rehearsing) could be used prior to takeoff to help pilots establish rapport? This premise is a springboard for an intricate and overlapping series of performance-art spectacles, which unravel across six episodes like a Russian nesting doll: a dating experiment, an American Idol-like singing competition, a journey to Congress and a tussle with the Paramount+ executives, among others.

The Rehearsal finds Fielder in a rare position: He’s now successful enough to commandeer the Warner Bros. lot (where, by the way, he also rebuilds an entire airport terminal, hiring 70 actors to play staff and travellers), but still enough of a cult figure that most of his human guinea pigs have apparently never heard of him. Somehow, Fielder still feels like our man on the inside, getting away with something ridiculous on HBO’s dime.

But if he has maintained his low-profile more successfully than his ultrafamous fellow pranksters Sacha Baron Cohen and Michael Moore, he also lacks some of their bite. Though Fielder occasionally gestures toward political and corporate satire, he’s more interested in kidding his overlords than going for the jugular. The idea undergirding all of Fielder’s most ambitious experiments is: “Isn’t it hilarious that I pulled this off on HBO’s dime?”

If he has another recurring theme, it’s the everyday difficulty of being a person in the world. Unlike Cohen, whose Borat was a chaotic force disrupting the superficial propriety of American society, Fielder creates rigidly controlled environments in which ordinary human awkwardness is the great unraveller. As always, much of the comic tension comes from Fielder’s socially awkward persona and his efforts to build a world to accommodate it, and he’s purposely ambiguous about how much of this awkwardness is real.

Though the show cannily incorporates Fielder’s heightened public profile – making mention of his recent foray into scripted TV (he dryly refers to his The Curse co-star Emma Stone as “the actress playing my wife”) – it remains cagey as ever about his personal life. Fielder’s passing reference to his own real divorce on the finale of Nathan for You sticks in the memory because of how unusual it was.

Do I want to see more of the “real” Fielder? Maybe, maybe not. But I can’t shake the feeling that the onscreen Fielder is hitting a wall. He’s still funny and clever, and with an HBO expense account his ideas are always impressively executed, so if I suggest that The Rehearsal is becoming a little too much of a good thing, I might feel like the emperor from Amadeus complaining about “too many notes.” And yet.

In an episode full of maximalist gags, the funniest and most resonant moment of “Smokers Allowed” was when Fielder instructed one of his hired actors to say “I love you” to him over and over again. In The Rehearsal, around the episode where Fielder attempts to get inside the head of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger by re-enacting the pilot’s life from birth, right down to dressing as a baby on massively scaled child’s bedroom set, I find his access to resources could not quite outpace a sense of diminishing returns.