Nathan Fielder on Instagram
Having had her interest peaked by the season two trailer, I found myself with the undesirable task of trying to explain Nathan Fielder’s truly singular documentary-surreal comedy hybrid HBO series The Rehearsal to her.
After bumbling and stumbling my way through a few qualifies — Well, it’s not really… or It’s sort of like… — my finacee got a bit frustrated! Just spit it out, she said. EXPLAIN IT.
I ultimately decided it was best to just fire up HBO and show her, and after watching the first episode of the first episode, she immediately understood why it was so difficult explain. As karma would have it, she found herself as the one attempting to do the explaining to our friends a few weeks later.
This is all an anecdotal way of trying to concisely detail how simultaneously insane yet unsurprising it is that season two culminated in Fielder becoming a literal 737-grade pilot. There’s taking a bit as far as you can, and then there’s what Nathan Fielder does.
In his new profession as a pilot, Fielder is trying to enact legitimate change to the industry and its safety, particularly as it relates to communication between pilots and their co-pilots.
So far, however, the FAA seems to be resistant to Fielder’s studies, as they told CNN they aren’t seeing the correlation that Fielder is making.
“The Federal Aviation Administration requires all airline crewmembers (pilots and flight attendants) and dispatchers to complete Crew Resource Management training,” the FAA said in a statement to CNN, adding that “[they aren’t] seeing the data that supports the show’s central claim that pilot communications is to blame for airline disasters.”
Fielder barely wasted a breath in torching the FAA, as he immediately called their response and their general position as being outright “dumb.”
“That’s dumb. They’re dumb,” Fielder said in response. “Here’s the issue: I trained to be a pilot. I’m a 737 pilot. I went through the training. The training is someone shows you a PowerPoint slide saying, ‘If you are a co-pilot and the captain does something wrong, you need to speak up about it.’ That’s all. That’s the training, and they talk about some crashes that happen, but they don’t do anything that makes it stick emotionally.”
The Nathan Fielder Rehearsal victory lap continues with him on CNN right now reacting to the FAA statement provided to CNN
“That’s dumb. They’re dumb.” pic.twitter.com/O5Qwycs4Ng
— Ben Koo (@bkoo) May 29, 2025
The central thesis of Fielder’s investigation of season two of The Rehearsa was that co-pilots often struggle to communicate openly with captains in the cockpit, leaving them hesitant to challenge authority even when they sense something is wrong.
Fielder’s hypothesis going into the second season was that co-pilots were not able to establish honest lines of communication with the captain in the cockpit, which leads to co-pilots feeling unable to question their superiors if they believed something was wrong during the flight.
While not the only cause of airline disaster, Fielder found numerous instances of poor communication between pilots on flights that ultimately crashed.
To put his theory to the test, Fielder established a series of social simulations that eventually culminated in him personally becoming a 737-graded pilot and captaining a flight with 150 actors on board — a loophole that allowed him to fly with so many people on board despite his relative lack of flying time experience — that had cameras and microphones in the cockpit, thus fully documenting the dynamic between pilots and co-pilots for the first time.
Content shared from brobible.com.