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The Media Today

Is Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal a Work of Journalism?

A comedian tackles aviation safety—and blurs the lines between the real and the absurd.
June 2, 2025 By Jon Allsop
Fielder in front of “Dumb Starbucks.” (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

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I discovered the Canadian comedian Nathan Fielder a few years ago (as with most pop-culture phenomena, I was pretty late to the party) when a friend made me watch Nathan for You, a show in which, playing a disconcertingly deadpan version of himself, he doles out advice to real small businesses—but the advice is terrible. I found it hysterical. In the first episode I watched (spoiler alert), he persuaded a gas station to sell the cheapest gas in America, but that price was only available after claiming a rebate—which had to be done in person, at the top of a mountain only accessible by foot. (This was, apparently, completely legal.) In other episodes, Fielder rebranded a coffee shop as a parody of Starbucks (calling it “Dumb Starbucks”), allowed a bar to bring back indoor smoking by turning a night there into a theatrical production, and created an outdoor-wear range advertised with Nazi paraphernalia, with the proceeds going to Holocaust education. (This was a spoof of a real clothing company praising a Holocaust denier; Fielder is Jewish.)

In 2022, HBO aired a new series from Fielder, called The Rehearsal. The premise was somewhat similar, but stretched to new degrees of absurdity, with Fielder going to extraordinary lengths to give real people the chance to practice interactions that they were dreading or unsure about; in the first episode (again: spoiler alert), he constructed a replica of a bar in Brooklyn in the name of helping a dedicated trivia player come clean to a teammate about not really having a master’s degree. If this episode amplified the zany, cringe-inducing approach of Nathan for You, The Rehearsal soon took a more disturbing turn; by the time it ended, Fielder had been rehearsing life as a father with a child actor who appeared to develop a real attachment to him. This raised ethical questions, and the series as a whole met with some criticism; The New Yorker film critic Richard Brody found Fielder’s approach to be “cruel” and “arrogant.” I largely agreed with a different review in the same magazine, by Naomi Fry, who wrote, under the headline “Don’t worry, Nathan Fielder also hates himself,” that the show was “a self-portrait of a man trying to reach past his relentless solipsism”; as ever with Fielder, you didn’t quite know if the butt of the joke was him, you, or the real people caught in his web. Either way, it was, at times, hard to watch.

It was therefore with a sense of both anticipation and some trepidation that I recently watched the second season of The Rehearsal, which just came out, also on HBO. The beginning of the first episode (spoiler al… you get the picture) did little to ease those feelings. It depicts a staged cockpit conversation between a pilot and a copilot that ends in a fiery plane crash—a simulation of a real-life incident, we soon learn. The scene then cuts to Fielder approaching John Goglia, who (again, in real life) served on the National Transportation Safety Board under presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, to discuss what Fielder sets up as the conceit of the season: the idea that aviation disasters have repeatedly been caused by copilots—be it through lack of confidence, social awkwardness, fear of professional consequences, or something else—failing to stand up to their captains when something seemed off to them. The Goglia meeting doubles, in classic Fielder style, as a meta inversion of the comedic genre: “It’s important for this first interaction to stick to the facts,” Fielder says. “No jokes. The goal is to earn his trust. Because for what you have planned, you’ll need this man to take you seriously.” There follow reenactments of other crashes, before Fielder muses on the “dilemma” of HBO having given him a big enough budget to help solve the problem, while obliging him to spend it making a comedy show. “So far, I was failing,” he says. “We were over ten minutes into this episode, with zero laughs.”

The lengths to which Fielder goes to break down communication barriers in the cockpit are predictably silly: you should watch the whole season for yourself, but suffice it to say that they involve real-life pilots (and their romantic lives), an exact replica of an airport terminal, a talent show called Wings of Voice, cloned dogs, a fake congressional hearing, a real meeting with the Democratic lawmaker Steve Cohen, and Fielder acting out key moments in the life of Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger—the pilot who famously pulled off the “Miracle on the Hudson” in 2009, safely landing a plane that had lost engine power—including by dressing as a baby and breastfeeding from a giant puppet of Sullenberger’s mother. (In one aside, Fielder also rehearses a difficult conversation with the German branch of Paramount Plus—which, in real life, removed the Nazi-outdoor-wear episode of Nathan for You from its streaming service after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023—while portraying the company’s staff as Nazi functionaries.) Despite this, the centering of a real-world concern makes season two read differently from season one of The Rehearsal, which was much more about interior feelings, not least Fielder’s own. (As Brody, of The New Yorker, put it, “The second season of The Rehearsal is instantly better than the first because it’s about something.”) And yet this season is about feelings, too. Its exquisite ultimate punch line—coming at the end of a finale in which Fielder is shown flying an actual Boeing 737, filled with actors playing passengers, over the Mojave Desert—sees Fielder remark that “no one is allowed in the cockpit if there’s something wrong with them, so if you’re here, you must be fine,” not only sounding a typically Fielderian note of denialism, but appearing to reverse-engineer the entire premise of the season.

And yet Fielder might actually be sincere about that premise—that everything isn’t fine with pilots—or at least want you to think that he is. As I watched—and especially as the punch line hit me—I was skeptical that he’d highlighted a real problem, and suspected that it was merely grist for an elaborate joke. Jeff Wise, an experienced aviation journalist, was similarly skeptical: “It defies reason to expect that a premium-cable comedy series could have anything substantive to say about hazard mitigation,” he wrote in Vulture. But experts in the field changed his mind, suggesting that Fielder had really hit on something; Wise then interviewed Fielder, also for Vulture, and Fielder affirmed that he’d been seeking to hit a sweet spot by finding “the middle ground of something that is real but also something that is funny and entertaining.” (In the show, he speaks in similar terms of his outdoor-wear range, noting that it actually has raised millions of dollars for Holocaust awareness. “It’s been my proudest achievement,” he says, and proof that “things that start off as maybe a little silly can actually have an impact in the world.”) Personally, if I’m now less doubtful of Fielder’s sincerity—though again, his great gift is that you can never quite tell—I remain skeptical that the issue of cockpit communication is one deserving of a season-long focus and lavish budget; flying, after all, is incredibly safe. But I definitely learned some things along the way about what the aviation industry describes, euphemistically, as “Crew Resource Management.” And Fielder is undoubtedly a master at showing how American law can be an ass, be that by putting a rebate box atop a mountain or finding out that he’s allowed to fly a passenger jet without the requisite hours of experience as long as those on board aren’t paying customers, even if actors are, of course, people too. His premise might really be, as the Times put it, that “cringe comedy can save lives.”

On Thursday, Fielder took his cause to CNN (which, like HBO, is owned by Warner Bros. Discovery), appearing for an interview with Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Brown. To my surprise, Goglia, the former NTSB member, was by his side; I’d assumed, initially, that he would turn out to be a prop in Fielder’s bit, or at least recoil in horror after watching the finished show, but there he was. (“It’s exploded,” Goglia said on CNN, of the show. “My emails exploded, my messages exploded, my grandkids were all over me—it’s unbelievable, the response.”) At one point, Fielder mentioned the deadly plane crash over the Potomac in Washington, DC, earlier this year, noting that communication issues appear to have been one contributing factor. At another, Brown read a statement from the Federal Aviation Administration—in which the agency said that it already mandates interpersonal-communication training, and that it hasn’t seen any data to support Fielder’s central claim—and asked Fielder to respond. “That’s dumb,” he said. “They’re dumb.”

So far, so serious, seemingly. And yet in other moments, Fielder was clearly having fun: he referred to his 737 flight as the “Miracle over the Mojave,” and suggested he’d saved the lives of the actors on board; he also suggested that Blitzer and Brown might have a hard time communicating in their jobs, and even that Brown might sometimes be intimidated by Blitzer. (“You’re Wolf Blitzer, right, so your name is first on the thing,” Fielder said.) Overall, the segment felt utterly surreal to me: it took place on actual CNN, but could just as easily have been staged as part of a Nathan Fielder show. It felt, in some ways, like the final step in Fielder’s bizarro universe dissolving imperceptibly into the real one.

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It’s not new, of course, for comedians to advocate on policy issues; indeed, Fielder references some of them—Seth Rogen (Alzheimer’s), Jon Stewart (9/11 victims)—at the top of the episode featuring the fake congressional hearing. Nor is it new for comedians—John Oliver perhaps foremost among them—to engage in what looks a lot like investigative journalism, at least as seen through a funhouse mirror, to highlight otherwise obscure social or regulatory problems. (Though Oliver, it should be noted, has rejected the J-word: “If you make jokes about animals, that does not make you a zoologist,” he told the New York Times in 2014. “We certainly hold ourselves to a high standard and fact-check everything, but the correct term for what we do is ‘comedy.’”) Since Donald Trump won reelection after sitting down with the likes of Theo Von and Andrew Schulz, of course, comedians with podcasts have increasingly been perceived as important political intermediaries. In an interview with Semafor last week, Adam Friedland, a comedian who hosts an interview show on YouTube, expressed some unease about this trend. “We’re not smart people,” he said. “We’re in nightclubs doing jokes about Tinder.… If I have a member of Congress on the show, I’m not going to be like, ‘Tell me about HR 274.’ What am I, fucking Ezra Klein?”

Fielder is clearly an incredibly smart person, even as he does incredibly dumb things. He is not a journalist, and even under a very malleable definition of the term, I don’t think season two of The Rehearsal is a work of journalism, even if it does shine a factual light on a plausibly newsworthy issue. (You really thought I was immune from Betteridge’s law of headlines?) But by engaging with current affairs, if not hot-button politics, in his latest iteration—however absurdly—I think he has become the perfect comedian with a conscience of this unmoored media moment, operating in grayer areas than the exasperated earnestness of an Oliver or a Stewart. This is, perhaps, precisely because of the absurdity, and how Fielder probes its boundary with the real—while also making viewers ponder the increasingly porous lines dividing the sincere and the fake, the selfless and the profoundly self-absorbed. He is also deft at skewering the human condition. This is a common task of the artist, of course, and one that Fielder has always performed. But in season two of The Rehearsal, he shows, perhaps, how journalists and those concerned with pressing problems might miss it, as they look for loftier, more abstract structural explanations.

Fielder is not a media critic, either, but in mining the fraught relationship between the truth and the culture of entertainment, he arguably has a somewhat similar sensibility. Last week, at least, his CNN interview ended with a rare explicit reflection on this media moment. As Blitzer and Brown moved to wrap up, Fielder interjected with “something that I think’s important to say”: that “these days, people will go to alternative news sources or comedy podcasters to get the word out about stuff, like Joe Rogan or Theo Von. But for me, it’s still CNN. All the way.” He smiled, with what appeared to be real warmth. Then again, with Fielder, you never can tell.

Other notable stories:

  • Earlier this year, the Pentagon took office space away from major mainstream news outlets and turned it over to, among others, Gabrielle Cuccia, a self-professed MAGA loyalist who was appointed to serve as chief Pentagon correspondent for the pro-Trump One America News Network; as CNN’s Brian Stelter reports, she “personally renovated the office space into what she called a ‘Liberty Lounge’ and chronicled the process on social media.” Last week, however, Cuccia wrote a Substack post criticizing Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, after he implemented much broader restrictions on press access, describing this as “troubling” and incompatible with MAGA. OANN has since fired her; Stelter has more details.
  • In 2022, properties connected to Lauren Chooljian, a reporter at New Hampshire Public Radio, her parents, and her editor were vandalized after she reported on allegations of sexual abuse involving Eric Spofford, the founder of the state’s largest network of addiction treatment centers. In the years since, numerous people have been jailed over their involvement in the attacks, but Spofford himself was never charged; on Friday, however, he was finally arrested, on charges of orchestrating the vandalism conspiracy. Spofford—who previously (unsuccessfully) sued NHPR and denied any involvement in the attacks—has so far declined to comment.
  • Recently, I wrote in this newsletter about the first round of a presidential election in Poland, in which Karol Nawrocki, a candidate with hard-right backing, advanced to face the moderate Rafał Trzaskowski in a runoff; the president has limited powers, I noted, but can veto laws, making the election significant for the current moderate government’s reform program, including in the realm of public broadcasting. Yesterday, Nawrocki narrowly won the runoff. (In the final days of the race, he said he would sue a news outlet that reported that he once helped procure sex workers for clients at a hotel where he was employed as a security guard; Notes from Poland has more.) 
  • And on Friday, Lester Holt signed off as anchor of the NBC Nightly News after ten years in the chair. (He will continue to host NBC’s Dateline.) “Around here, facts matter, words matter, journalism matters, and you matter,” he told viewers, before his team joined him on set. Tonight, Tom Llamas will step into Holt’s shoes—becoming just the fourth anchor of the show in the past forty years, the Washington Post notes, and inheriting “a sizable audience in today’s heavily fragmented media environment.”

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Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.