Critic Reviews
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The first season of The Rehearsal was a truly unique television experiment, so it was always going to be a tough act to follow. But season 2 manages to be even more daring, profound, and subversively hilarious. No one thinks quite as far outside the box as Fielder.
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The Rehearsal is frequently plane-crash TV – but my oh my, does it stick the landing.
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What makes this series an improvement on the first is that it is consistently and deliberately laugh-out-loud funny. As with the first, it is incredibly moving. But Fielder peppers it with far more gags and knowing winks to the audience, which helps to make his moments of insight all the more powerful.
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How do you re-create the disorienting high of seeing something you’ve never seen before a second time? The answer provided by The Rehearsal’s second season, which premieres on HBO on Sunday night, is: You don’t. That’s not to say its six episodes aren’t full of outlandish surprises and sudden turns
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What results is both sidesplitting and one of the most stressful television watching experiences in recent memory. .... His typically deadpan persona takes on new weight here. “The Rehearsal” remains one of the best comedies out there, but what’s at stake is no joke.
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The show’s elegant writing lets him walk that delicate tightrope between lampooning his own self-importance and forging a more complete understanding of himself by forensically studying the people around him. .... Dissonance is what keeps “The Rehearsal” flying high as one of the funniest, most insightful shows on television.
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It shouldn’t be profoundly emotionally moving. Nevertheless, The Rehearsal Season 2 is all of these things and more, thanks wholly to the mad genius its creator, director, and star, Nathan Fielder.
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Season 2 is a gut-punch; an artful knock-out blow that further defies all classification, expectation, and logic.
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“The Rehearsal” Season 2 [is] a cut above the vast majority of television, as well as a shrewd improvement on Season 1. And I said Season 1 was the best show of 2022, so…
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It reaffirms that Fielder is as much of a conceptual artist as he is a comedian or TV show creator, imbuing what other comics would treat as disposable bits with great depth, and committing to them to an extent that beggars belief. Season two might not have an Angela, but it’s a stronger, smarter, more thematically coherent show, and one that doesn’t flirt with outright cruelty the way some accused season one of doing.
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A marvel of philosophy, social science, and art critique, all of which it delivers in the funniest package imaginable. Television doesn’t come more inventive, daring, and amusingly absurd.
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Fielder is not unlike the pilots he’s studying, struggling to articulate himself under duress. By design, his exercises force him to confront his flaws and discover an inner confidence. He appears determined, to paraphrase Evanescence, to save himself from the nothing he’s become.
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The result is a season that's not quite as boundary-breaking as the first, but which maintains a clearer sense of direction from start to finish.
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More grounded (so to speak) and less philosophically ambitious than its predecessor—but still consistently unique and funny and strange and profound.
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If you’ve been a fan of Fielder’s brand of humor over the years, or just want to see a comedy unlike anything you’ve seen before, this new season of The Rehearsal is for you.
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The fact that Fielder conflates his pursuit to the Wright brothers is as ridiculous as you would expect from The Rehearsal. But that doesn’t negate that Fielder may be on to something here, and watching how that plays out this season already feels like a weird kind of appointment TV.
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The new season maintains a more cohesive focus — in this case, developing a method to improve commercial aviation safety — without sacrificing the show’s signature weirdness.
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The reward is a season of truly audacious TV that, at many points, is not only unlike anything else currently airing, but is genuinely unlike anything else I've ever seen, period. The catch is that Fielder is wrestling with the exact same questions he's been wrestling with since Nathan for You began in 2013.
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Fielder continues to have a knack for finding extreme personalities happy to show their quirks on camera, but “The Rehearsal” remains a show about his own journey. .... This may be why the story of Season 2, if not its undeniably impressive stunts, can feel auxiliary — like a spinoff with an extremely specific, transportation-related theme.
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Even as many of the middle episodes remain table-setting for this and aren’t quite as engaging on their own, the final reveal of it all is one of the best things Fielder has ever done.
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Its branched-off farce becomes the star’s creative adversary, chopping up his comedic flow. At his sharpest, Fielder’s Nathan makes a viewer want to curl up in a corner even as they’re laughing. But the second season’s broader excursions sprawl beyond his control, with jokes dragging far beyond the zone of discomfort into blank boredom.
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This is arguably the point of it all — Fielder trying to set up the most extreme contrast between the task at hand and what his fictionalized self really cares about — but comedically, it doesn’t quite mesh. The season’s biggest laughs rarely have anything to do with his struggle for connection. And at the same time, the ridiculousness of how he tries to address the crash problem undercuts any attempt to play the personal material — including a discussion of whether Nathan is on the autism spectrum — even vaguely seriously.
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