The Rehearsal Season 2 and the Aviation Problem

Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal returned on HBO on 20 April 2025 with a six-episode second season. Fielder, who wrote and directed all six episodes and who is the show’s central subject in ways that expand across the season, structured the new run around a specific real-world question: do the communication patterns in commercial airline cockpits contribute to fatal accidents, and can those patterns be altered through a rehearsal protocol? The question is presented in the opening episode as absurd. By the final episode, the question is being argued, in a literal sense, to members of the United States Congress.

I want to describe what the season does, because the description is the only honest way into talking about it.

The premise, restated

In the first season of The Rehearsal, which aired in 2022, Fielder used HBO money to construct elaborate physical recreations of real-world situations so that participants could rehearse difficult conversations or life decisions. The show was a comedy, but it was a comedy structured around a sincere proposition, which was that human beings might be able to prepare for difficult experiences if they could rehearse them with sufficient fidelity.

The second season takes the proposition and applies it to a specific industrial problem. The National Transportation Safety Board’s reports on a number of fatal commercial aviation accidents, over the last four decades, have identified a recurring factor: the first officer (the junior pilot in the cockpit) has noticed a problem, has tried to communicate the problem to the captain (the senior pilot), and has been dismissed or ignored in a way that contributed to the accident. The specific pattern, which aviation literature calls “crew resource management” or CRM, has been the subject of industry training programs since the late 1970s. The training programs have improved the rate of CRM-related accidents. They have not eliminated them.

Fielder’s argument, which the season develops across its six episodes, is that the CRM training programs do not work well enough because they do not rehearse the specific conversational pressures of the cockpit at sufficient fidelity. His proposal, which is also the season’s premise, is to construct rehearsal environments in which those pressures can be trained.

What the season does

The season’s six episodes run around fifty-five minutes each. The structure is not what you would expect.

The first episode establishes the aviation problem through a mixture of NTSB audio, animated reconstructions, and Fielder’s direct-to-camera explanation. It is the most straightforwardly documentary Fielder has ever been. The second and third episodes set up various rehearsal scenarios, including, in one case, a full-scale replica of a regional airport terminal populated by hundreds of paid actors and a functional (though not flight-certified) Boeing 737 airframe. The fourth episode stages a live rehearsal with real pilots. The fifth episode follows one of those pilots through a genuine cockpit simulation. The sixth episode pivots to a Congressional hearing at which Fielder appears, in character as himself, to argue for the expansion of the rehearsal methodology.

The Congressional appearance is not a joke. It is a documentary record of a House Transportation Subcommittee hearing held in April 2025 at which Fielder testified. I want to underline this. Fielder, the creator of Nathan for You, testified to the United States Congress about aviation safety. The testimony is real. The hearing footage in the episode is the actual hearing.

What the season is doing formally

The question that followed Fielder into the second season, after the first season’s ethical complications around the participant known as Angela, was whether the format could continue to operate as comedy, or whether the show had become something the comedy label could no longer contain.

The second season’s answer, and it is a carefully arrived-at answer, is that the comedy and the sincerity are not separable. Fielder is funny in the season. His performances of social awkwardness, his literalised staging of interpersonal patterns, his willingness to implicate himself in the situations he stages: all of this is recognisably the Fielder mode. But the show is not using comedy as cover for sincerity. It is using comedy as a formal tool for examining what sincerity looks like when institutional structures are the obstacle.

The fourth episode, which stages the live rehearsal with real pilots, is the season’s structural peak. Fielder has constructed a replica cockpit environment in which pilots can practice the specific conversational patterns that are known to have failed in real accidents. The pilots are real. The situations are drawn from real NTSB reports. The actors playing the captains are coached to reproduce the specific dismissive responses captured in the cockpit voice recorders from real accidents. The first officers (real pilots, unpaid volunteers) are asked to push past the dismissal.

What happens, in episode four, is that the pilots begin to succeed. They find ways to communicate that get through. Fielder, watching this from the observation booth, visibly moves between delight and terror. The delight is at the methodology working. The terror is that the methodology is working on a problem that killed people.

The Evan thread

One plotline, which threads across the season, follows a specific first officer (called Evan in the show) through the training protocol and eventually onto a real flight. Evan is a pilot who has known, for years, that his captain-side communication patterns are a weakness. Conventional CRM training has not helped. Fielder’s protocol works for him in a way that, by the season’s end, is visibly moving.

What Evan’s story does is locate the show in a human rather than a formalist register. The season is not, in the end, about whether the rehearsal methodology is clever. It is about whether a specific pilot will come back from a specific flight with a specific skill. The stakes are, literally, life and death. Fielder refuses to treat the stakes ironically.

The HBO question

What HBO has permitted with The Rehearsal is, by any honest accounting, remarkable. The production budget for the second season has been reported, though not officially confirmed, at around 40 million dollars for six episodes. The Boeing 737 set alone would have cost a substantial portion of that. The network has, through its willingness to fund Fielder’s specific mode, made possible a documentary experiment that conventional documentary funding would not have supported.

The trade, for HBO, is that the show generates an amount of cultural conversation disproportionate to its audience. The Rehearsal has never been a mass audience show. The first season’s average audience was, by industry reporting, in the low millions. What the show produces is the kind of critical attention and social-media generativity that networks use to buttress their overall brand. The show is a prestige signal. It tells the industry what HBO is still willing to do.

The Warner Bros. Discovery financial situation, extensively reported through 2024 and 2025, makes the question of what HBO can continue to commission acute. The Rehearsal is the kind of show that is easy to lose in cost-cutting cycles. Whether the second season’s genuine Congressional outcome changes that calculation is a question for the next two years.

What the season leaves

The Rehearsal season two is, I think, the most ambitious television project of the year so far, and also the most difficult to place in any existing format category. It is not a documentary, exactly, because Fielder’s construction of the environments is theatrical rather than observational. It is not a comedy, exactly, because the stakes are real and the methodology is sincere. It is not a reality show, because reality is not the register, even when the people are real. What it is is the format Fielder has been building towards since Nathan for You started in 2013. A decade of formal refinement has arrived at something that does not have a name.

The congressional testimony may or may not result in changes to aviation training protocols. The FAA’s response, as of late April, was that they were reviewing the material. Whether the methodology Fielder proposes is taken up by the industry is, in some sense, not the question the show is asking. The question the show is asking is whether attention, rigorously applied, can alter institutional patterns that professional training has been unable to alter.

The show believes it can. I am, after six episodes, inclined to believe the show.

Watch episode four. Pay attention to the pilot faces during the rehearsal. Watch the testimony in episode six. Pay attention to Fielder’s hands.