Can someone explain Nathan Fielder's "The Rehearsal" to me?

Cafe Society
1

A friend mentioned this show to me because the second season ended with Fielder apparently flying a 737. I knew nothing about the show before watching that episode and… I just didn’t get it.

I see it’s supposed to be a comedy, and from what I read afterward it’s a variation on reality show documentaries, I guess. Maybe a bit like Sacha Baron Coen’s Borat and Ali G characters, in which he interacts with people who don’t know it’s satire. As much as I don’t usually care for that sort of thing (it seems unfair), I think Coen was brilliant and hilarious. But I fail to see what Fielder was going for here. To me it failed as comedy and it certainly failed as documentary.

I’ve been a commercial pilot for many years and currently work as a pilot trainer. While watching the episode I could feel my IQ dropping precipitously. Nearly everything about aviation was either factually incorrect, misrepresented or vastly exaggerated. Fielder’s thesis seems to be that pilots aren’t communicating well and that this leads to accidents. He would have been correct some decades ago, but that has largely been addressed through Crew Resource Management and the safety benefits are obvious and unambiguous. This is a mandatory part of pilot training. I teach it myself.

What did I not understand about this? Am I too close to the topic to see the humor?

2

I’ve never seen the show but I read that Fielder actually trained as a pilot for years with the intention of incorporating flight into a show, and that was really him piloting the plane. Can’t understand why he would spend so much time and effort to put out bad info unless that’s somehow part of the comedy.

Minor Nitpick. It’s Sacha Baron Cohen, not Coen.

3

I’ve watched a few episodes. It gets weirder.

Some strange concoction of humor, setting up scenarios, then changing the rules to change the outcome. The mix is an odd look at social norms and personality conflicts, not for the belly laugh but for the “oh, yeah, I see what you mean, thats kinda funny”

I don’t get it.

4

Just summoning our resident airline pilots if they want to weigh in:

@LSLGuy
@Richard_Pearse

5

Totally not interested in even finding out what the OP is talking about. Whether it’s a broadcast TV series, a streaming series, YouTube vids, or some other distribution tech I’ve never heard of I don’t know and don’t care to know.

The OP, @Llama_Llogophile, is just as much a jet-driving pro as I am (was now that I’m retired). In fact his experience covers a larger fraction of the industry than mine does.

I’ll defer to him on this one. Even though he’s the one asking the questions. Which seem to me at first glance to be much more about the creative / dramatic goals of the show creator(s) than about aviation.

6

This is very likely; I think Nathan Fielder is best described, first and foremost, as a performance artist. The “premise” of season 1 is that Nathan, who has social anxiety, will often rehearse scenarios that will be difficult for him. The show, then, will use its massive HBO budget to faithfully recreate scenarios that other people, the reality stars of the show, are struggling with, to allow them to rehearse and be more comfortable in the moment.

I’ll use spoiler tags from here out:

The first episode works as a pilot (pun not intended) of a sort, where a real person wants to confess to a member of his trivia team that he doesn’t have any advanced degrees. To do this, Nathan recreates an entire bar in a warehouse in Portland (I think), faithful down to the tiniest detail. (If the insanity of building an exact scale replica of a dive bar doesn’t charm you, the rest of the show won’t either.)

But the episode doesn’t start out this way, it starts out watching Nathan interact with an actor he’s hired to portray the real person, creating an exact scale model of this guy’s apartment in the same warehouse, down to the smallest detail, after sending in actors pretending to be from the gas company to film the “contestant’s” living space. Layers, right?

The show branches from there, with “bottle episodes” that center around a specific rehearsal, but an overall theme of having a woman (ostensibly another contestant, but revealed after the show to be an actress – you can never tell what’s real, what’s “real”, and what’s a joke in Nathan’s shows) who wants to “rehearse” having a child. He does this by renting a house in Portland and hiring child actors to work in shifts around the clock to allow this woman to go through the stages of having a child, from infant to toddler to child to teen.

Nathan shows his process of creating “The Fielder Method” of acting, where he goes back to LA to teach the recurring cast of extras how to get into their own characters for the purpose of helping with his rehearsals. But, not satisfied with the job he’s doing, he hires an actor to play himself, and actors to play each of the actors he’s teaching, and sits in on his own class to assess it as a student. Layers. Not satisfied with his ability to “become” his student, he sends that actor off to live with roommates associated with his fake job while hiring actors to play the roommates so he can experience the same thing that the real actor is experience while trying to pretend to be someone else. Etc. Layers.

And at one point, he talks about how he needs a familiar place to clear his head, so he breaks down the entire bar set he created for episode one and builds it again in his HBO studio building, at what we assume is an obscene, pointless, and delightful expense.

As the season progresses, a conflict arises with one of the child actors, and the show slowly pivots, as the audience eventually realizes, to a deeper examination by Nathan himself about whether or not he would be a good father, and you realize that the entire season had more depth than you realized at any individual episode. Or, at least, that’s the narrative arc Nathan wants you to believe. But what is real? We don’t know, because it’s all layers.

It’s a brilliant show that’s also not for everyone; I can see the “what’s real, what’s not real” aspects wearing on people who don’t want to escape into Nathan’s little fantasy art installation.

With season 2, the show is ostensibly about CRM and how Nathan’s expertise at creating rehearsal environments will result in better training than what pilots currently get. Does he genuinely believe this? Is this all an excuse for him to have fun flying 737s, the craziest thing for a comedian to do? These questions are part of the charm of the show. And I won’t spoil it, but season 2 has similar thematic “what is this show really about” shifts as season 1.

So yes, if you watch it thinking that it’s an honest attempt at improving airline safety, it’s going to fall flat. But that’s not to say it’s dishonest about it. It’s just that… well, it’s a show about the journey of watching the show.

7

Thank you for that thorough and enlightening explanation.

Color me even further stupefied at the direction American entertainment is going.

It seems as though everyone needs to be a professional consumer of entertainment to even begin to understand what it’s about.

This is vaguely akin to Amusing Ourselves to Death - Wikipedia, but definitely not the same thing.

I think I’ll put on my onion belt & go yell at a cloud. At least I can understand that. As can the cloud. And the neighbors.

8

Well I grew up not understanding what the hell the appeal of Twin Peaks was, but yeah, it’s definitely gotten more extreme.

He did a show called “The Curse” that’s even more confusing. I loved it… I think.

9

It most certainly was dishonest insofar as it presented factual aviation information. Even if I agree it was presented within a legitimate comedic framework, I think it was irresponsible.

Example: The use of the word “loophole”, as a way of allowing Fielder to fly at 737 struck me as very disingenuous. He did NOT become an airline pilot. Fielder supposedly got his private, instrument commercial and multi-engine licenses. He then took sim training for a 737 type rating (see below). That’s all perfectly legit, but is an extremely uncommon way for a pilot career to progress. He then (apparently, supposedly) flew the plane with another rated pilot, probably under Part 91, which does not govern airline operations in the United States.

He essentially flew a private flight, which was allowed by his licenses and training. I don’t think that’s well described as a “loophole”. Pilots ferry big planes like that all the time, and while it’s much more common for those people to be employed by an airline (and subject to Part 121 rules, which are more strict), that’s a thing that happens.

They did point out that he has fewer than 1500 hours, which means Fielder cannot be employed by a U.S. airline even if he wanted to. So again, I don’t know what safety problems he thinks he was pointing out.

But again, maybe this misses the point. I can see the comedic premise of going to great lengths, moving mountains, to set up unlikely situations. But I think the way this blurred with the documentary style is a little irresponsible. Seems like it’s telling people all kinds of cowboy nonsense is going on with big jets, which really is not true.

Whatever - I don’t get it. Not really funny in the aggregate.

(About the sim training: Fielder made it sound like it’s crazy to go from the sim to flying the real jet. That’s the way it’s been done for decades, but it omits the context that in airline operations you’re doing this with a qualified training captain whose job is specifically to transition new pilots to real world operations.)

10

I can see the show developing a cult following.

11

Yes, the “loophole” language is a valid criticism. Also, the way he made it seem like “cameras aren’t allowed in the cockpit,” when, correct me if I’m wrong, pilots record themselves in commercial flights all the time (possibly not true of major airlines, and definitely not included in crash data recorders, I think). The loophole, to the extent that there was one, was that he paid actors to pretend to be passengers and flight crew, thus recreating the feeling of flying a commercial flight. But, as you point out, not really a loophole as this was just a private flight with non-paying passengers.

And I think going from a sim to landing a big jet is crazy, although not so much if you work your way up through smaller aircraft. As a layperson, it sounds nuts that everyone’s first real landing in a big jet is with a full compliment of passengers. If you told anyone that at a party they’d probably react, and then, after a beat, say, “Well, I guess it makes sense.”

Further…

I don’t buy for a second that the footage of him ferrying around empty aircraft (as a real working pilot) happened AFTER the passenger flight, as he implies. I’m sure he got practice in those empty aircraft first, probably for liability reasons. And I can see feeling deceived, if that’s true, if you’re not willing to play along with the show.

But as for his actual intentions, he didn’t put forward any position that his expert, John Goglia, didn’t agree with. And in that sense, I don’t feel it was dishonest. Unless Goglia’s a quack, his criticisms of the current training seem valid, and while Nathan’s idea of having the pilots pretend to be “First Officer Blunt” and “Captain Allears” might be silly, the underlying concern seems genuine. For what it’s worth, John Goglia doesn’t seem terribly upset about his portrayal.

12

Ever been on an airliner? There’s a decent chance you were on a flight with a first-time pilot being supervised by a training captain. With few exceptions, a pilot’s first flight in the big jet is during a normal revenue flight. I remember mine very well, and the passengers were completely unaware and unaffected.

When I say “first-time” pilot in an airline context, I mean someone with a lot of experience who has very possibly flown other jets before, but it’s their first time in that type. The simulator is great, but not perfect. So airlines (and other flight operations of various kinds) have an “Initial Operating Experience” period to help new pilots transition to the real thing. Again, it’s been this way for decades.

I’ll buy that it could have happened that way. But I doubt very much Fielder would have gotten this sort of opportunity without HBO level money (and very possibly insurance) behind him.

I have a friend who became a commercial pilot in retirement (from an unrelated field) and had a very hard time getting hired to do anything in jets. He eventually got on with a charter company and worked his way up to captain. That’s an unusual path to a jet job and it involved a lot of patience and work on top of his years of private flying. I’ll grant that Fielder probably (hopefully) earned his licenses for real, but getting a 737 type rating and then getting hired somewhere without much more relevant experience would be very unlikely if not for the TV thing.

As for Goglia, he seemed cautious in what he said. I don’t know how it was edited, but I’m glad he didn’t feel manipulated.

13

I get that, and I get that it’s (obviously) fine, since it happens all the time, and safely. But it sounds nuts.

That wouldn’t surprise me at all. It’s also the sort of detail that he wouldn’t offer up if it made the scene less interesting.

It’s reality TV, after all. If it were my industry, I’d probably be annoyed too…

14

Thanks. I can’t watch it though so I can’t offer any insight, sorry.

15

I just watched this show over the past few weeks, and am completely enthralled by it.

@Llama_Llogophile , it sounds like your only experience with the show is the final episode? If so, I’d say that you’re missing hours of context that allow that episode to work. It’s like watching the last 10 minutes of a movie and picking apart how nothing makes sense and you don’t get it.

This is one place in which having the rest of the show as context would help. The entire premise of “The Rehearsal” revolves around this question of “what if we could practice things before making decisions?”, and the fact that real world situations cannot be modeled perfectly and those who are doing the rehearsal cannot predict how they will actually behave in an uncontrolled, unmanaged situation.

The final episode does not imply that it’s wrong or irresponsible that pilots go from the sim to flying the real jet. Rather, it suggests that in life there is no real way to 100% rehearse- to do the thing before doing the thing. We have to prepare and leap. There is always a gap. And this is true even in high-stakes situations, when it makes us feel safer to imagine that perfect preparation is possible.

The magical moment in this final chapter of the show for me was showing the flight sim in the warehouse, and how it paralleled all the other sims we’d watched Nathan create in his own (HBO’s) warehouse. The point he was attempting to make (agree with it or not), is that they were all one and the same, and all flawed because they cannot be perfect. It’s not an indictment of the flight sim, but an indictment of our imagination that anyone can be fully prepared for anything.

I managed to watch this all without seeing any media about the show, and I was thrilled and floored when, at the top of that final episode, it was revealed that he had gotten his pilot’s license. It was a jaw-dropping reveal.

Watching this show, while I certainly thought about parallels to Sacha Baron Cohen, I felt the work most closely was akin to Bo Burnham’s Inside special. Creating emotional connection while at the same time challenging the audience’s desire to believe that what is presented as true is actually authentic (with a strong side of “how do the people who are playing pretend navigate or understand the difference between authentic performance and real life?”).

16

Sure as hell sounded like it to me.

Yes, I did see only the final episode and I’ll allow that I bypassed some context. But that doesn’t change the fact that there was a lot of utter BS. Ironically, if Fielder is worried that pilots aren’t communicating effectively, he might be reassured that he probably wouldn’t make it through an actual airline interview. Not enough experience, for one. But the way he behaved during the 737 flight would itself be a red flag.

17

Personally, I think the joke of Nathan Fielder is to find emotionally fragile people and torture them for his audience’s amusement. The joke is that he goes to great lengths to torture them. It’s kind of Honey Boo Boo for people with liberal arts degrees.

The New Yorker did a piece on his cruelty. I think that you can read 10 free articles a month, but I don’t have a gift link.

18

To be honest, I think his ambition outpaced reality in that episode – he wanted to set up a scenario where he was doing things intentionally wrong that would require the FO to speak up. But he knew that the FO was, you know, an actual pilot, and so he tried to spin it with the “the FO wants to be a TV star, and I’m a person of authority in that regard.” But he knew he couldn’t actually do anything dangerous, so he kinda danced around, didn’t really get what he wanted, and then had to get back to business. But yeah, the fact that he behaved poorly in the cockpit was the point.

And the show acknowledges several times that he’s in no way qualified to be an actual airline pilot, that he has nowhere near enough hours to get his foot in the door. Several of the experts comment on that. I just don’t remember what episodes.

You may enjoy the episode where he actually gets his solo license. Spoilers – he struggles, a lot. Way more than other students typically struggle. And that episode feels genuine in a way that most of the show doesn’t; you really see him put in the work. This isn’t, “Oh I fly around in my private planes all the time because I’m a rich hollywood type who has money for hobbies,” he’s clearly doing this just for the show, and it’s hard for him. It’s not groundbreaking, as there’s lots of similar content on aviation youtube, but it’s well done.

19

That is the final episode- the entire getting his license through flying the 737 arc happens in the finale.

20

Ah, thank you. They all ran together in my memory.