The Rehearsal

Nathan Fielder has—on his inside-out business advice show Nathan for You, his scripted series The Curse, and the first season of HBO’s The Rehearsal—shown us he can be funny. But The Rehearsal in its second season proved that he can genuinely make an impact. The six-episode season was a Rube Goldberg contraption intended to improve airline safety by helping pilots and copilots speak more openly. And while Fielder’s creative ingenuity means that the journey to making change stops along the way at a fake singing competition and a staged re-enactment of Chesley Sullenberger’s infancy, it also kicked off a national conversation about potential improvements in pilot training. The Rehearsal had a further power beyond its implications for the transportation industry. Throughout the season, and especially in its stunning final moments, as our hero pilots a real 737 above an unknown desert, Fielder pokes at questions animating contemporary life: How alone are we? And can we fix that solitude—or merely come up with increasingly complex ways to distract ourselves? For expanding from an already-bold central premise into comic territory never before trod, and for gazing, unblinking, into painful silences, The Rehearsal wins a Peabody Award.