The Rehearsal Is Great, but Nathan Fielder Is Wrong About Aviation Safety
Separating art from artist
1. Introduction
Nathan Fielder is many things: a comedian, a graduate from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades, and a licensed Boeing 737 pilot.
Fielder has a very popular show on HBO called The Rehearsal. He’s done other things too, some of which are very funny, but this has absolutely been his most popular project.
The Rehearsal has two seasons—the first was released in 2022, and the second just wrapped up about a week ago. In season 1, Fielder introduces us to a practice he alternately calls “rehearsing” and “the Fielder Method.”
He developed his rehearsal technique making the Comedy Central show Nathan For You, where he gave struggling companies ridiculous ideas to drum up business. One of his most well-known stunts involved rebranding a failing coffee shop as a “Dumb Starbucks,” complete with “Dumb Iced Vanilla Lattes” and “Dumb Nora Jones Duets.”
The show was a Borat-style half-documentary kind of thing: Fielder needed to do absurd improvised comedy during interactions with a bunch of normal business owners, while keeping the episode moving on a coherent plot line. This was, obviously, very difficult! So he and his team would role-play different scenarios, trying to guess how subjects might react, and preparing Fielder for the many possible versions of his ultimate performance.
According to a profile in Vulture, this didn’t really work so well: “people would invariably say and do things Fielder had failed to see coming.” And after four seasons of disappointing unpredictability on Nathan For You, Fielder realized that “it would be interesting to make a show about the futility of trying to predict the future.”
So he did just that!
In the pilot episode of The Rehearsal, Fielder meets with a teacher named Kor Skeete who has a secret to get off his chest. Skeete is an avid bar-trivia player, and when he first met his team, he told them that he had a master’s degree—when in fact, he only has a bachelor’s. He’s been keeping up the lie for years, and he wants Fielder to help him break it to his friends.
Fielder agrees, and tells Skeete exactly how he’ll help: by rehearsing. In explaining his plan to Skeete, Fielder reveals that he’d rehearsed the very interaction they were now having—a crew posing as gas-leak-investigators had mapped out Skeete’s house, and Fielder had built a replica and hired an actor to practice the meeting with.
The scene cuts to a rehearsal where Fielder explains all this to his Skeete-impersonator, who responds, “Wow.” Then it cuts back to the real Skeete, who says the same thing.
From there, it only gets weirder. Fielder helps a woman named Angela who wants to rehearse motherhood. She’s not involved with anyone, so Fielder tries to find her a boyfriend, but when the relationship doesn’t pan out, he steps in to coparent with her.
The rest of the season is a bizarre exploration of the vacuousness of personal identity, unreality of reality TV, and Nathan Fielder’s own neuroses. I liked it a lot, but New Yorker critic Richard Brody thought it “cruel and arrogant” more than anything else.
His cleverness masks the hollowness of his schemes. No digression, no incidentals, no loose ends can intrude on Fielder’s taut, compact, self-contained sketches. He looks the Look at the people he films, but doesn’t seem to see them.
Make of his critique what you will—and go watch season 1 if you haven’t—but it’s all very beside the point, because season 2 of The Rehearsal has a vastly different vibe.
2. The Vibe of Season 2 of The Rehearsal
Fielder opens the first episode, called “Gotta Have Fun,” with what must be one of the most dramatic scenes in the history of comedy television.
Two pilots sit in a cockpit, calmly chatting about their final approach. The nervous-looking co-pilot expresses some skepticism about their bearing—too far right, by a hair—but the captain brushes him off.
As they descend, the co-pilot becomes more worried, glancing around and shaking his head. The captain ignores him, until finally the co-pilot says, “Blair, I don’t like this” as alarms begin to go off inside the cockpit.
The captain rushes to abort the landing, pushing the throttle all the way up, but it’s too late—they crash, and each pilot’s body is thrown around limply as red flames engulf the screen. Slowly, the camera pans left, and an unmoving Nathan Fielder appears, staring into the lens.
We switch to a wide shot showing Fielder walk off the set, and the intro sequence begins.
As it turns out, Fielder’s been reading a lot about commercial aviation crashes recently. And he thinks that a leading cause of deadly accidents is poor pilot communication—particularly co-pilots’ unwillingness to challenge their captains.
Fielder invites John Goglia, an aviation expert and former member of the National Transpertation Safety Board, to meet with him. (Fielder is skeptical he’ll be taken seriously, so invites Goglia on a ruse—having the old man give a lecture to a room of actors posing as college students before he approaches and starts a conversation about his cockpit communication ideas.)
On screen, Goglia pretty immediately agrees with Fielder’s thesis—that poor communication between captains and co-pilots (“first officers,” technically) is a major factor behind aviation fatalities. But in an interview with The Cut, Goglia revealed that he’d been quite a bit more skeptical:
In those first ten minutes or so, I didn’t see much of a connection between accidents and what he was proposing. But he said he’d seen the problem with actors, where someone famous is playing opposite somebody who’s an up-and-comer. And he articulated it very well. Then I morphed over to realizing, based upon all my interfaces with pilots, that I had seen some of that. Maybe not as clearly as he was focusing it, but at some level.
Fielder is a talented entertainer, no doubt about it.
[SOME SPOILERS INCOMING! IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN SEASON 2 YET, PLEASE GO WATCH IT OR SKIP TO STRAIGHT TO SECTION 3. SERIOUSLY, DON’T RUIN THIS FOR YOURSELF.]
Season 2 takes all kinds of incredible twists and turns—Fielder organizes a singing competition, runs experiments on dog-clones, and re-enacts Sully Sullenberger’s entire life (yes, entire)—then, because all that wasn’t enough, he spends two years earning a license to fly the Boeing 737, and pilots an aircraft filled with 150 actors over the Mojave Desert.
It’s good TV—on level, in my mind, with Tim Robinson’s excellent and similarly-absurd I Think You Should Leave.1 But insofar as it tries to make serious policy suggestions, it’s a miserable failure.
3. I’m Not Sure If Nathan Fielder Understands How the Government Works
In episode 5, “Nathan heads to Washington.”
See, he’s finally developed a concrete solution for poor pilot communication—and it has to do, shocker, with acting. He thinks that if he gives a captain and a first officer roles to play then they might not be so nervous about giving and taking feedback in the cockpit—they could always save face, shrug it off as “just my character talking.”
On John Goglia’s suggestion, Fielder seeks an audience with the House Transportation Subcommittee on Aviation. While he rehearses in a Congressional-hearing-room replica, HBO’s lobbying team reaches out to Rep. Garret Graves (R), the committee’s chairman, on his behalf.
Graves’ office declines to speak with Fielder, and so he pivots. Eventually, he’s able to secure a meeting with the committee’s ranking member, Rep. Steve Cohen (D) of Tennessee.
That meeting turns out to be, in short, an unmitigated disaster. There are three reasons for this:
Nathan Fielder doesn’t have a great sense of what things governments do. He presents Rep. Cohen with a video he’s prepared outlining his pitch: in the video, pilots receive character sheets before their flight—the first officer becomes “First Officer Blunt,” who “loves speaking up,” is “honest, almost to a fault,” and “not afraid to take over the controls if necessary;” and the captain is assigned the role of “Captain Allears,” who “loves feedback” and is “not afraid to admit when he’s wrong.”
Fielder seems to think that the government should somehow facilitate this pre-flight roleplay, which is obviously very silly, and Rep. Cohen reacts accordingly. He seems a bit amused, and suggests instead that “maybe the airlines could be encouraged to have a better relationship between the pilot and the copilot.”
Cohen thanks Fielder, and pulls out his phone, clearly expecting the meeting to end. A solid thirty seconds of awkwardness ensue, as Fielder ignores the cue to leave until Cohen stands up and walks out ahead of him. Now, clearly this is a bit—the joke, basically, is that Fielder might be an eensy bit autistic, which brings me to:
Nathan Fielder completely misrepresented the intent behind the meeting. Steve Cohen is not only ranking member of the Aviation Subcommittee, but also a member of the Congressional Autism Caucus. Fielder only secured a meeting with him via the Center for Autism and Related Disorders, the board of which he bought his way onto.
In a statement sent to CNN, Rep. Cohen claimed that he was “told that Nathan wanted to talk about autism.” Cohen also wrote that “Most of the substantive parts of a 45-minute interview never made it on the air.”
In a separate conversation with the Memphis-area newspaper Commercial Appeal, Cohen commented, “Maybe people thought I acted abruptly at the end … But we’d had a long meeting, and I got up and said, ‘It's been nice talking with you’ because I had another appointment I was late for.”
Slightly dishonest editing practices aside, this is obviously a foolish way to approach a meeting with a politician! If they’re not interested in hearing your idea, it almost certainly won’t work to try to Trojan-horse it into a meeting about an unrelated topic. If Nathan Fielder really had something very important and serious to say, with enough effort, he certainly could’ve had it heard directly—Roger & Me–style—instead, he took an entertaining but ultimately unproductive shortcut.
Now why is it that Fielder thought Rep. Cohen might be open to his slightly-weird ideas? Because…
Nathan Fielder underestimates how self-obsessed and terrible politicians are. Steve Cohen was, at the time of their meeting, trying to pass his Emergency Vacating of Aircraft Cabin (EVAC) Act.2 It would instruct the FAA to assess aircraft evacuation procedures, with special focus paid to “passengers with disabilities … [and] passengers who have difficulty speaking or are non-verbal.”
This is a boring-sounding idea, obviously, and no comedian would ever want to talk about it, obviously, but even so, Rep. Cohen “figured that … [Fielder] was interested in the EVAC Act because people with autism could have difficulties in a crash situation.” Part of this is down to Fielder’s self-misrepresentation, but a lot of it is simply a result of how politicians function. They really like themselves and their own ideas, and they mostly only want to talk about those ideas.
Legislators like Scott Wiener are the exception, not the rule: most of the time, if you want a meeting with a politician to go well, you should be telling them something they already agree with, and can easily integrate into their mental schema under the category “my idea.” Persuasion is hard to do, and usually has to go through lots of staffers first.
But even if Fielder were a political mastermind, it wouldn’t be enough to save his agenda. Because his ideas are, fundamentally, extremely bad and stupid.
4. I’m Not Sure If Nathan Fielder Understands How Aviation Safety Works
There’s a particularly cringe-worthy moment in the CNN segment Fielder did alongside John Goglia. Fielder is responding to an FAA statement that dismissed his suggestions—it argued that the data doesn’t support his claims about pilot communication error causing so many crashes. He comments, “That’s dumb, they’re dumb,” and says, “the crash that just happened here [in Washington DC], it seemed like they saw that was sort of the issue.” Then, turning to Goglia, he asks, “Right?”
Goglia responds, half-nodding, “A lot of disconnects, between multiple parties.”
Not a particularly ringing endorsement of Fielder’s claim! Why? Because Fielder’s claim is total hooey: the DC crash was caused mostly by a poorly-thought-out helicopter flight path, and by unfortunate lapses in communication between the helicopter pilots and air traffic control. The pilots of the jet in question had no idea they were in danger, and miscommunication between them played no role whatsoever in the tragedy.
In fact, it’s not clear that pilot miscommunication has caused any deaths in American airspace in recent decades. I mean, the DC crash was so notable because it was the first fatal aviation accident in the US since 2009.3
I just don’t understand what problem Fielder thinks he’s solving!
In the CNN segment, asked what the federal government should do, Fielder suggests nervously, “Trump’s gotta do something, or..?”
Goglia quickly interrupts: “Too high,” he says, “You need to build a foundation.”
“We’re building a foundation,” Fielder agrees.
I mean, in what world would it make sense for the president to pay attention to any of this? We’re talking about maybe, generously, avoiding a dozen deaths a year—Trump is too busy causing many hundreds of thousands of deaths a year to care!
The “foundation-building” approach doesn’t make much sense to me either. In his interview with The Cut, John Goglia admits that most deadly crashes are caused by pilots on airlines outside of the US and Europe, where training standards are much more relaxed. What’s the US government supposed to do about those cases, exactly?
For that matter, what’s the US government even supposed to do about cases within the US? In The Rehearsal, Fielder repeatedly points out that a major factor behind poor cockpit communication is the power dynamic between captains and their first officers. Even though FAA regulations stipulate that pilots and co-pilots should be considered perfect equals during flight, captains can credibly threaten to have insubordinate first officers fired. Asked by The Cut whether pilots could really have their co-pilots laid off, Goglia answered, “In an instant.”
But the idea that power dynamics can make conversation awkward isn’t unique to aviation. Fielder admits on CNN that “it’s, like, a human thing,” before suggesting that a similar awkwardness probably exists between Wolf Blitzer and his newer cohost Pamela Brown. (The two quickly deny it, of course, but it’s obviously true.)
If Fielder thinks that the problem is so deep-seated, though, then why would he assume that a role-playing exercise during FAA training could fix it? Clearly the issue mostly lies in the airlines’ internal accountability processes, which seem to unduly punish assertiveness. And that just puts us back at Rep. Cohen’s dismissive suggestion! “Maybe the airlines could be encouraged to have a better relationship between the pilot and the copilot.” It doesn’t seem like Fielder’s got anything more substantial to add.
The truth is that deadly aviation accidents are vanishingly rare—around 1 in 100 thousand. Adjust for the distance covered, and death in the air becomes a statistical non-reality:
Whether or not your pilots get chummy before their flight probably doesn’t matter so much. xkcd.com/1252 is evergreen:
And even if it did matter, the US government can’t force people to be friends. (I know, I wish it worked like that too.)
Of course, even if they could, Nathan Fielder would be totally incapable of convincing them to do it for pilots!
Whatever crusade he’s on, he should stop being on it.
5. I’m Not Sure How Serious Nathan Fielder Is
Right, so, this guy is a comedian. He’s a Sacha Baron Cohen–level prankster (in fact, he was a writer for Baron Cohen’s Who Is America?), and a recurring theme of The Rehearsal is the idea that he shouldn’t be taken seriously.
Is what I’ve done like writing a post called ‘Borat Is Pretty Funny, but Actually the Running of the Jew Is a Bad Idea’?
Honestly, I don’t really know!
He’s all about blurring the lines between fiction and reality, this Fielder guy. He was probably “in-character,” whatever that means for him, when he went on CNN. But he also seems to talk about this with full, dark sincerity—it seems like he really thinks that passengers are dying en masse as a direct result of poor cockpit communication.
If it turned out that this was all a ruse, I would be extremely surprised. I think lots of people would be very upset, would feel very betrayed. Already, all over social media, you can find viral posts like this:
If we found out this was all just for the sake of content, how would fans like @charlesxholmes react? Violently? Hijacking-ly, perhaps?
Look, either Nathan Fielder is being totally earnest, in which case he’s just sort of a bit of a moron, or he’s actually evil and has intentionally set a plan in motion to increase American aviation fatalities.
Between these two scenarios, your guess is as good as mine. I suppose we’d better start rehearsing for each possibility…
Yes, on level. I think Robinson’s comedy is, and I know this is weird to say, more cerebral. There are times that what Fielder’s doing feels a little hack-y: like, putting a guy on stilts to make him seem tall because you’re supposed to be a baby now? I mean, it’s too much! I’m a pretty simple kind of guy: I like Seinfeld, I like 30 Rock—I like shows where the people and stories are funny, not where the comedy is all slapstick and bit-based.
Tim Robinson does this really well, even in the skit-comedy format: his characters, though ridiculous, have some sort of ineffable fundamental realness to them, which Fielder is less good at maintaining. Of course, the shows are entirely different: Fielder is telling one big story, and his ability to spin up and sell a beautifully convoluted, recursive narrative is astounding.
This name sucks so bad, Jesus H. Christ.