Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal” Takes Flight

As this list of rehearsals might suggest, while most of what happens in the show starts in the airport, it’s not really about that. In fact, the more the show becomes about the airline industry, the less its insights seem to land there. The show is about Fielder himself, but, specifically, it’s about Fielder as an actor. In the series finale, we learn that he has spent the past several years becoming a licensed pilot. We watch his long journey to master his requirements, to perfect his landings, to accrue the number of hours required. We then learn that he plans to fly a 737, filled with people, alongside a co-pilot, in order to test his theory about cockpit social dynamics. It’s an elaborate stunt, and—like all his stunts—it is not even remotely worth it. He doesn’t effectively test his theory, and, even if he did, he’d already essentially exhausted his options to effect legislation or even industrial policy. But to take the goal of these experiments at face value is to misread the show.

Instead, the whole thing becomes about Fielder’s private—by which I mean known only to us, the audience—concern that he might be on the autism spectrum. A few episodes earlier, in order to get a meeting with a congressman, Fielder meets with an autism organization. The congressman is involved with both the Federal Aviation Administration and autism advocacy. So Fielder uses his show’s resonance with the neurodivergent community—a resonance he gleans from positive reviews and online essays about the first season—to get into the meeting. In the process, though, Fielder (the character on-screen, to be clear) begins to suspect that he might have a diagnosis of his own. He submits to an fMRI prior to the flight and, after landing, seems to dodge the voicemail that would inform him of his diagnosis. It’s a stymied revelation that hovers over the back half of the season. Is this show about Nathan Fielder getting an autism diagnosis?

Whatever the answer, it doesn’t really matter. The idea that the show might lead to a real-life diagnosis for Fielder seems plausible conceptually, but that doesn’t seem like something Nathan Fielder would do, does it? Because the real thing is never as interesting to The Rehearsal as the fake thing. There’s a moment during the Colin sequence when Fielder has built a row of identical sets designed as full-scale replicas of Colin’s apartment. He’s placed a pair of actors in each set playing Colin and Emma, a woman Colin has begun dating. Colin can’t seem to read the signs that Emma wants him to lean in for a kiss. So Fielder has all the couples negotiate this awkward encounter. They all do, they all get over it quickly, and, soon, the row of rooms is just a row of actors making out in pairs. Fielder invites the actors’ significant others to come watch. He hires an intimacy coordinator as the scenes get more intense. Fielder and the show essentially forget about Colin as the focus shifts to the actors and to their boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives who are all seemingly OK watching their partners make out under the guise of “acting.” This fact animates Fielder more than almost anything else on the show. Acting is a strange mystery. The way people inhabit falsehood is considerably more interesting than whatever the truth is that they’re hiding.