Comedian Nathan Fielder’s utterly chaotic docuseries will have you watching with fingers over eyes. It’s a uniquely awkward, occasionally overwhelming show – whose finale has to be seen to be believed
Season two of the Rehearsal opens in a cockpit, where the atmosphere is almost unbearably strained. With the plane apparently on a collision course (“we have those hills to the right of the airport, remember?!”), the co-pilot begins to panic, but the captain haughtily dismisses his colleague’s concerns. Sure enough, the plane begins to plummet, before crashing into a fiery wreck. We zoom out to reveal a set, where Nathan Fielder stares and blinks into the camera gormlessly, having conducted this horrifying performance – one of many reconstructions of real-life disasters to come.
This is, of course, the comedian’s totally wild docuseries, in which he prepares people for big life events via elaborate (and occasionally unethical) walk-throughs. The first season culminated in Fielder possibly causing untold psychological damage to a child actor who was only too happy to accept him as his real dad (he apparently hadn’t grasped the extent to which he was part of an intricate plan to help a woman who wasn’t sure whether she wanted to have kids).
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