The Dizzying Ascent of Nathan Fielder

As the credits rolled for the season finale of The Rehearsal at the end of last month, I tried to make sense of what I had just seen. Did a comedian really just pilot a passenger jet full of actual people, and if he did, was it supposed to be funny? I laughed a lot, sure, but I laugh when I’m nervous, and no HBO show — not Game of Thrones, not Lovecraft Country, not even The Last of Us — rattles my nerves quite like this one.

The Rehearsal is cringe comedy in the extreme, and this jaw-dropping flight was the peak of the art form as a planeload of actors entrusted their lives to “the least experienced person licensed to fly a 737 in North America.” And that’s according to the pilot! The joke appeared to be that this was not a good idea.

Or maybe the joke was on me for believing my eyes. Maybe this whole scene was one last “rehearsal”, another elaborate and wildly expensive facsimile of life itself, the final piece in comedian Nathan Fielder’s nesting doll of needless simulations: a fake flight to match the fake bar he installed in the fake airport terminal, just before staging the fake singing contest. Season two begins in a fake cockpit. Its focus appears to be Fielder’s fake passion for improved communication between pilots.

You’re never quite sure with The Rehearsal. The reality show, which closed its second season this spring and debuted on HBO in 2022, is, in many ways, the logical outcome of Fielder’s critically-acclaimed and award-winning docu-comedy series Nathan For You, which ran for four seasons on Comedy Central from 2013 to 2017.

Then and now, the genius of Fielder’s work lies in how he pushes the boundaries of reality television and, in the process, invites viewers to question the nature of reality itself.

Now at 42, he’s one of the most successful comics of his generation. In addition to winning the Independent Spirit Award for The Rehearsal in 2023 and the Writers Guild of America Award for Nathan For You in 2019, Time magazine named him one of the most influential people of 2023.

His work invites viewers to wonder, do the small business owners in Nathan For You know they’re guests on a comedy show? Did that ice cream place really serve poo-flavoured yogurt? Is Dumb Starbucks, the “parody” coffee shop Fielder installed in a struggling cafe in East Hollywood, making some sort of statement?

Or maybe it’s art, or a marketing stunt, or a joke, and we’ve given him way too much credit.

Who is this guy? Is he really this awkward or is he forever in character?

The critics are never quite sure. In a 2024 appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, Fielder took issue with a New York Times review of his equally hard-to-define scripted comedy-drama, The Curse. The critic praises co-star Emma Stone, who plays his wife, for her “laser-precise performance.” But Fielder, the critic continues, “is a more limited, stiff actor.”

“I don’t think they get what acting is,” says Fielder, in his trademark monotone, dressed against type as a suddenly serious actor. “That’s the character, my brother. They don’t get that I’m playing a stiff, nerdy guy, which as you can see is very different from the real me.”

It brings to mind a classic bit from Nathan For You in which Fielder pushes back on his public persona as “a guy who never smiles and doesn’t know how to have fun.”

“In reality,” he deadpans, “I’m actually very fun, relaxed and easygoing.”

A ‘rehearsal’ for real life

The Rehearsal, Fielder’s big-budget HBO show, was first introduced as a program where people could rehearse for life moments they dread in absurdly realistic simulations. One man wants to confess to his trivia team that he lied about having a master’s degree. To help him prepare, Fielder creates a fake trivia night in a replica bar, staffed with actors. One woman is considering starting a family. Fielder sets her up in an Oregon farmhouse to simulate adoption with a robot baby, multiple child actors and a simulated husband.

Like any great comedy, the whole enterprise went off the rails pretty quickly, becoming something more ambitious, maybe even personal, as Fielder explored his own social difficulties. When the fake husband quits the rehearsal, Fielder steps up, becoming a fake stepdad to a fake adopted son, and suddenly Fielder himself (or his TV persona) is the subject of his own bizarre rehearsal.

It’s dizzyingly meta; maybe that’s the point. Fielder’s work has long resonated with autistic viewers, and The Rehearsal often feels like an insider’s commentary on masking, the practice of trying to hide one’s autistic behaviours by copying others. Many autistic people, myself included, develop scripts to help with social interaction, often in a bid to be perceived as “acting natural.”

Watching The Rehearsal in 2025 feels like ground-breaking television, tailor-made for this cultural moment of increased visibility for people with autism, ADHD and the spectrum of neurodivergence. In some circles, Fielder is now being hailed as a genius.

And I feel a rush of hometown pride for the guy. He grew up in Vancouver, where he performed magic tricks as a teen at children’s birthday parties and made his comedy debut at the Chutzpah! Festival, where organizers had invited him to perform a magic set, but he performed stand-up instead. After high school, he moved to the University of Victoria to study business, then moved to Toronto to pursue comedy. He graduated from the Humber College comedy program in 2006 and, during that time, was part of the Toronto alternative comedy troupe Laugh Sabbath while he made short comedic films.

Fielder started his career in television through reality TV, first with Canadian Idol, then This Hour Has 22 Minutes, Nathan for You and most recently The Rehearsal. His presence in reality television is unlike anyone else’s. Nobody can swing between laugh-out-loud comedy and wide-eyed, social horror like he can.

Most of the time, he seems totally out of his mind but when you’re in his carefully curated world, he seems utterly sane. He simultaneously bends the genre while pushing its boundaries. The season two finale of The Rehearsal took us to new heights as he delivered a twist fit for HBO dramas: in a bid to test his aviation theories in real-time, Fielder has spent two years actually learning to fly.

For the weeks in the show leading up to the season two finale, Fielder had staged strange scenes and social experiments, hoping to showcase (and solve) what he claims is the single biggest cause of fatal plane crashes: poor communication in the cockpit. Transcripts from multiple airline disasters, re-enacted by actors in flight simulators, make the issue crystal clear: the captain, who cannot be questioned, is making some questionable calls. The first officer, whose job is to step in, can’t seem to find their voice.

Certainly, that same dynamic is at play when Fielder declares he’ll be flying the plane. Someone should stop him.

We see Fielder take flying lessons and, ultimately, earn his pilot’s license, but not before his instructor’s note that he’s “the slowest learner they had ever taught.” That’s a red flag. We’ve seen him pass the flight simulator, only to marvel that pilots go straight from the flight simulator to planes full of people with no further practice.

That’s a red flag too, and not just for Fielder, but nothing can stop him at this point. Not the airlines — he uses his HBO money to lease one — and not the Federal Aviation Administration, as he leans on The Rehearal’s ridiculous premise to exploit the legal loophole that allows him to fly a full plane, so long as the people are actors pretending to be his real passengers.

The fact that the plane Fielder is flying is a Boeing jet is not lost on the viewer. For years now, the aviation company has been in shambles: there have been quality control problems, delays in certification, a checkered safety record, even issues with astronauts in space. In other words, crisis after crisis.

But people still fly, assuming that nothing bad will happen in the same way that few people speak up when their Uber driver is acting strangely.

Despite all the red flags, they just carry on. So, too, does season two of The Rehearsal until the big reveal at the end of the season that Fielder has been building towards all season long.

If you can mask for others, you can mask alone

With the lives of 150 actors hanging in the balance, one is left with the same thought that comes when you read just about any news story lately: surely, someone will stop this from happening.

But nobody does. Even the experienced first officer recruited for the second seat is compromised not only by his own communication issues, but his own Hollywood dreams, which make it unlikely that he’ll do anything to step on Fielder’s toes.

Even Federal Aviation Administration certification itself is no problem. The online questionnaire asks if Fielder has any mental health issues, and after two seasons of The Rehearsal, four seasons of Nathan For You, whatever The Curse was, and the stunt he’s attempting to pull at that moment, it’s clear that he does.

But it’s a self-disclosure form, and Fielder decides that he’s fine. If you can mask with others, you can mask when you’re alone.

So the plane takes off from San Bernardino, and suddenly, all of those people are up in the air with a comedian moonlighting as a pilot. You remember the trouble that Fielder has had with landing, and the way this seemingly unfocused season now hinges on whether or not he can land the plane, figuratively and literally. Your heart starts to pound, and all you’re left with is the hope that what you’re watching isn’t real.

The Rehearsal loves to trick you with a scene that appears real on first blush, but turns out to be an elaborate con job. Surely, this passenger flight over the Mojave Desert is one such recreation?

Not so. Online sleuths have found the flight. It circled Los Angeles three times on Feb. 16 — the same week the Trump administration’s Department of Government Efficiency fired some 400 FAA employees, thereby making every flight as dangerous as the one we just watched.

Maybe it’s still not real. Or maybe it’s like that one actress explained when Fielder asked her how she justified a love scene as her boyfriend watched off-screen.

“It’s not ‘real’ real,” she said. “But, like, it’s happening while it’s happening.”

The Rehearsal is utterly confounding. Fielder’s social experiments barely make sense. The viewer is never quite sure if it’s meant to be funny, and if so, whether or not it succeeds.

For some, it hasn’t, particularly in the first season, where Fielder faced criticism for his reckless social engineering, disingenuity and even his use of child actors.

Maybe that’s intentional. Maybe it’s just how it goes when the creator has been masking for his whole life, as he finally admits in the finale, rehearsing for real life until reality loses all meaning.

“I’ve always felt sincerity is overrated,” Fielder says, in one of his perfectly deadpan voiceovers. “It just ends up punishing those who can’t perform it as well as others.”

Is Fielder himself being sincere here, or is this a joke? That’s Fielder’s whole deal, and The Rehearsal, more than any of his previous works, presents an answer: it doesn’t really matter.

Nothing is real — not just because this is an HBO show, but because everyone is always acting, copying behaviours they’ve observed, or saying things in ways that have worked for them before in order to get by in a chaotic, fast-moving society.

In the end, Fielder gets tested for autism, but the results don’t arrive soon enough to make a difference for whether or not he is deemed fit to pilot the plane. By the time he gets the voice mail, he’s already completed the flight.

“They only let the smartest and best people fly a plane of this size, and it’s nice to know that,” says Fielder, in a voiceover that echoes a commonly used phrase by Donald Trump — and obvious lie — about the coterie of sycophants and criminals with whom he consorts.

“They only let people into this cockpit if there’s nothing wrong with them, so if you’re here, you must be fine.”

He deletes the voice mail.

Who’s flying the plane? A reality TV star that everyone must know has no business flying the plane. Unfortunately, he’s got money to burn, people touting his genius, and unquestioned power in a culture where nobody knows how to question authority.

You think about that and suddenly, The Rehearsal seems roughly as real as real life, and you find yourself asking the same awful question: is this supposed to be funny?

I’m laughing again. It’s the nerves.