“To help stop planes from crashing.” That’s the actual premise of The Rehearsal Season Two. Or, more precisely, that’s the absurdly sincere mission Nathan Fielder sets out to achieve – with a budget from HBO and the caveat that he must also create a comedy series along the way.

​

Picture Kafka ghostwriting an SNL sketch, directed by Stanley Kubrick and funded like Game of Thrones. The result is a season of television that is deeply strange, deeply ambitious, and often – somehow – very, very funny.

​

Fielder believes he’s found a key flaw in commercial aviation procedures: that copilots too often fail to challenge pilot error during flight emergencies. So, naturally, he builds a full-scale commercial airplane simulator, recreates terminals with unsettling fidelity, and stages surrealist versions of everyday aviation life to field test solutions. It’s anthropological comedy with a crash-test dummy heart – a genre that Fielder seems to be inventing in real time.

In one of the show’s many jaw-dropping set pieces, Fielder spends what must be hundreds of thousands to recreate a pilots-only lounge he was denied access to in a real airport, all in an effort to watch how copilots behave behind the scenes. It’s a moment so bizarre and meticulous that it feels like it shouldn’t exist outside of a dream – or an elaborate conceptual art installation.

​

Each episode centers on another layered, recursive effort to train away copilot complacency. In one, a long-distance romantic conflict is folded into a flight simulation, subtly nudging the participant to be more assertive – both in conversation and in the cockpit. The underlying idea is dead serious. The execution? Wildly unhinged.

​

Fielder, as ever, weaponizes awkwardness like a scalpel. His signature deadpan – picture a sleep-deprived Ray Romano studying behavioral psych and channeling Andy Kaufman – remains unshakable even as the show spirals into increasingly bizarre territory, from a fictional aviation singing competition judged by real pilots, to a completely sincere attempt to speak before Congress under the banner of autism awareness and air safety. And the kicker? It all somehow feels cohesive.

​

A recurring tangent involves Fielder’s unlikely stint as a junior producer on a Canadian version of American Idol that leads him to stage a fake TV talent show with the purpose of building pilot assertiveness. It’s called Wings of Voice, and it all plays out like a fever dream, but the fake production is so authentic that it fools both the contestants and the pilot judges.

​

By the time the season reaches its crescendo – a finale stunt so massive and ridiculous it would be unfair to spoil – the viewer is left wondering: Was that real? Did he actually do that? And the scariest question of all: Did it actually work?

​

What’s so miraculous is that beneath all the layers of parody, surrealism, and conceptual chaos, Fielder’s crusade feels … oddly genuine. Maybe he really does want to make the skies safer. Maybe his whole absurdist house of mirrors is just a strangely built Trojan horse for a very real message: we ALL need to get better at conflict. With our bosses. Our partners. Our coworkers. Ourselves. Maybe, Fielder suggests, we’re all just copilots waiting for permission to speak up.

​

The Rehearsal Season Two is many things. A social experiment. A prank on logic. A meta-commentary on the very nature of television. A comedy without punchlines. But more than anything, it’s a staggering testament to what happens when you give a singular mind the money, resources, and freedom to follow a joke so far down the rabbit hole that it pops out the other side as something profound.

​

This show won’t be for everyone – and it never pretends to be. But for those tuned to Fielder’s frequency – where sincerity and satire are indistinguishable, and laughter often sounds like disbelief – The Rehearsal is an all-timer.

​

Trust the process. But maybe don’t trust the pilot. And buckle up. There’s never been a show quite like this before.