Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal Season 2 Trailer Brings The Absurdity To The Airline Industry
In 2022, Nathan Fielder released the first episode of "The Rehearsal," which was all about using role-playing exercises to help people prepare for awkward social interactions. The season quickly raised its ambitions; within a few episodes, it switched focus to Nathan trying to prepare for fatherhood, crossing all sorts of ethical boundaries to do so. The result was a truly thrilling season of reality television, but one that also made us wonder if maybe child acting shouldn't be legal.
The long-awaited trailer for season 2 just dropped, and it seems like Nathan's upped the stakes yet again. He's no longer interested in helping people prepare for raising a child; he's trying to stop passenger airplanes from falling out of the sky. It's a timely problem given the apparent rise in plane accidents lately, but can we really trust Nathan to be the one to solve it? We don't know if he'll succeed, but the trailer promises we'll at least get a fascinatingly awkward six-episode season of TV out of his new experiment. Let's just hope that nobody dies.
Has Nathan finally flown too close to the sun?
Nathan Fielder is no stranger to tough conversations. As we saw throughout the four seasons of his series "Nathan For You," not to mention all those riveting role-playing arguments he got into during "The Rehearsal" season 1, Nathan thrives on making everyone uncomfortable. But watching the season 2 trailer, it's hard not to wonder if Nathan's bit off more than he can chew. There's a moment in the trailer where he's being grilled by a man who appears to be real-life Congressman Tim Burchett at, seemingly, an honest to goodness congressional hearing. "Mr. Fielder, where does your sense of altruism come from, where all of a sudden you want to save lives?" he asks Nathan. "You're known for pranking people!"
It's a reasonable question. Can Nathan's silly role-playing antics, designed ultimately to entertain his bewildered viewers, still be funny when thrown into such a high-stakes industry? Can we really trust him to take preventing airline crashes seriously, given that last season his seemingly-altruistic motivations turned out to be an excuse for him to roleplay being a dad?
"The Rehearsal" season 1 constantly blurred the boundaries between reality and fiction, leaving us in doubt over the moral implications of what we were seeing. Fielder's 2023 show "The Curse" also thrived on making viewers' skins crawl. Given the trajectory of his artistic career so far, it's possible "The Rehearsal" season 2 will be the most horrifying season of television he's given us yet.
"The Rehearsal" season 2 premieres on HBO at 10:30pm ET on April 20, 2025.