The Meaning of The Rehearsal

What is Nathan Fielder’s show The Rehearsal about?

On the face of it, Nathan creates elaborate rehearsals for other people who need to do something challenging, like becoming a mother or revealing a long-hidden lie to a friend. The second season is about creating rehearsals for pilots. Nathan studied the history of commercial plane crashes and noticed a pattern: many of them occurred because the second officer did not speak up and voice concerns to the captain, or was too timid about doing so. The rehearsals Nathan designs are intended to increase the emotional and psychological ability of the second officer to speak up, and of the captain to receive it.

Fielder is a comic, and the comedy lies in the caricatured scale of the rehearsals, combined with Nathan’s characteristic deadpan affect—an affect heightened in sharp contrast to the sheer size and pantomime of the rehearsals he stages.

That is what The Rehearsal seems to be about on the surface. But what is The Rehearsal really about?

When the Surface Doesn’t Fit

How do we know there is something else going on anyway—something deeper and symbolic?

The main way you know there is a deeper meaning is when something doesn’t fit. When something on the surface does not fit with the most obvious narrative of the story, you look closer. And the thing that doesn’t fit is the main character: Nathan.

On the surface, this story is about Nathan creating rehearsals for other people. But time and time again, it is Nathan himself who rehearses. Indeed, the last two episodes are entirely about Nathan. We learn in the final episode that Nathan has been taking pilot lessons for years. The centrality of Nathan himself was the plan written from the very beginning.

Nathan’s personal involvement in the show raises the first deeper question: Is a rehearsal different from reality?

The show blurs these lines, but it also does something more. In the first season, one of the child actors struggled to distinguish between Nathan as his pretend father and a real father. In the second season, Nathan seems perplexed that the actors’ significant others are unbothered when their partners kiss on camera. Climactically, Nathan rehearses as a pilot, but literally becomes a licensed commercial pilot.

In each of these instances, the line between rehearsal and reality becomes unclear. Nathan has always been interested in this relationship—the blurring of categories between seriousness and silliness, reality and rehearsal.

We often think something can be serious and real, or funny and fake. This assumption is embodied whenever someone is offended by a joke and protests, “It was just a joke.” The implication is that you shouldn’t treat it as reality because jokes don’t exist in the realm of reality. But Nathan has always believed that things can be both funny and real.

In Nathan for You, his previous show, the premise was to increase business for small business owners using ridiculous and comical strategies. While on the face of it this might seem like pure comedy—and not reality, because the ideas are absurd—by being on the show, their business actually increased. Far more people knew about them. One of his stunts, Dumb Starbucks, even made it onto late-night news. That is genuine reality. They received millions of dollars’ worth of television advertising from a joke.

The same was true with a mock production of The Voice featured in The Rehearsal, called Wings of Voice. One of the contestants, Lena Love, complained to Variety magazine: “I signed up to be a singer, but not a lab rat.” But even that complaint assumes a strict division between rehearsal and reality, between appearance and reality. Nathan does not believe in that division, and he proved it false: she was on a competition that aired on television, and that competition had a winner. The whole point of the real The Voice is to get attention, and that is precisely what being on this rehearsal competition accomplished. The only reason we are talking about Lena Love is because she was on the show.

The same holds true for The Rehearsal as a whole. Near the end of the season, Nathan attempts to present his aviation communication solution before Congress, and they refuse to see him. But even though no legal change was enacted to improve aviation safety, more people know about the issue than ever would have otherwise, simply because Nathan made a show about it. He cannot improve aviation safety by directly legislating aviation safety—he is a comedian. But comedians can capture people’s attention, and that is what he did.

Notice one crucial aspect: unless it was entertainment, unless it was comedy, no one would have watched it. Nobody would watch a dry documentary about cockpit communication. People watched because Fielder is a comedian. It was precisely because it was both silly and serious that it was able to be effective.

The Slant Path to Truth

This was the exact strategy Nathan the prophet used with King David in the Bible, after David slept with Bathsheba, a married woman, and then had her husband killed. When Nathan confronts David, he doesn’t immediately tell David what he did was wrong. David already knew the facts; direct truth would have bounced off his defensive soul. So Nathan tells him a story—a story about someone else, a rich man who took a poor man’s beloved lamb. It is only after David is emotionally invested in the story that Nathan can pierce his conscience.

This is a permutation of Shakespeare’s frequent use of the play-within-a-play, where characters witness their own actions mirrored on stage. The key insight is that we rarely have direct, unmediated access to reality or to ourselves. We need a back door, a window, or a rehearsal. As Emily Dickinson wrote:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies

It is a roundabout path to truth.

Fielder’s work, however, is not simply a postmodern exploration of themes or an intellectual exercise in blurring the boundaries between rehearsal and reality. To uncover his deeper point, we first have to explore another theme: the symbolism of autism and anxiety.

In the penultimate episode of the second season, Nathan shares that after season one, many viewers reached out to say how deeply the show resonated with their experience of autism. Throughout the episode, it becomes apparent that Nathan might be autistic himself, although he is reluctant to admit it. He visits a clinic and undergoes diagnostic testing, such as being shown pictures of people’s eyes and asked to identify the specific emotions those eyes communicate.

The introduction of autism is not a departure from the show’s core premise; it is a direct permutation of the rehearsal concept. An autistic person lives with a persistent social difficulty—specifically, a challenge in reading social and emotional cues. Notice that social difficulty is also the fundamental theme of the aviation crisis: the pilots’ social and hierarchical inhibition in communication. Furthermore, the therapy many individuals with autism undergo consists of rehearsing social scenarios to build communicative competence. Nathan’s potential autism is a microcosm of the entire season.

In the final episode, Nathan reveals that he has been training as a pilot for two years to understand the pilot’s dilemma from the inside. In the climactic sequence, he prepares to fly a commercial Boeing 747. But during the licensing process, he learns that any documented medical condition disqualifies an applicant—including a history of anxiety. He visits a doctor for an evaluation, and the doctor offers an MRI that can evaluate indicators for both anxiety and autism. Nathan undergoes the scan, but learns the results will not be available until after his flight.

He pilots the plane, lands successfully, and everyone is safe.

Silly, Serious, and Both

What is the point of this? The point centers entirely on the relationship between these categories.

Was Nathan’s flight a rehearsal or reality? It was not a routine passenger flight, but it was unquestionably a real flight. Was Nathan autistic and anxious, or was he a pilot?

The point is that it does not matter if something is a rehearsal, because it is also reality. It does not matter if it is silly, because it can also be serious. It does not matter if he is autistic or anxious; he can still be a pilot.

Perhaps it is not merely that things are “both/and”—perhaps one is often the cause of the other. Maybe the rehearsal is taken seriously precisely because it is silly. Maybe you can participate in a pretend singing competition and still become famous. Maybe Nathan can pilot an aircraft precisely because he is autistic, or because he worries so intensely. His quasi-autistic obsession with repetition, rehearsal, and protocol—what we normally call practice—is the very discipline that makes him a capable pilot.

Maybe his anxiety is what led him to create the show in the first place, because he genuinely worried about pilots. And conversely, maybe if the pilots had a touch more autistic detachment—if they cared less about subtle social hierarchies and were unburdened by the fear of disapproval—they would communicate clearly and without hesitation in the cockpit. Perhaps the pressure to conceal fear and emotion is what prevented those second officers from speaking up.

One of the closing shots is a sustained zoom into Nathan’s eyes. It calls back to the clinic where he took the emotion-recognition test and struggled to read feelings from eyes alone. The viewer is placed in the position of the person being evaluated: you and I are asked to look at Nathan’s eyes and read what he is feeling. Autistic people often struggle both to read the emotions of others and to express their own feelings overtly. Staring into Nathan’s eyes, it is genuinely hard to tell what he feels.

In one of the final scenes, Nathan receives a phone call from his doctor with the MRI results—ready to tell him whether he has autism and anxiety. Nathan ignores the call.

Categorizing everything neatly into serious or silly, rehearsal or reality, autistic or neurotypical, often creates more confusion than clarity. Sometimes reality is both.

What Are We Rehearsing For?

One of the characteristic patterns of The Rehearsal is that rehearsals frequently go off-script. They produce unexpected emotional fallout or generate new problems that require further, even more elaborate rehearsals. This is fundamental to the architecture of the show.

The deeper insight is that we rarely know what we are rehearsing for. The participants in the show rehearse for an event they intend to enact in the future—the supposed reality. But the rehearsal itself is the show, and therefore it is already reality. Rehearsing is the reality of the show.

Without rehearsal, reality often cannot happen successfully. Pilots will not communicate, and flight safety cannot be ensured. The rehearsal is required for the reality.

The show itself is also a rehearsal in two ways. First, it is a rehearsal of an attempt to solve this communicative dilemma. Whether this rehearsal will affect real aviation protocols remains to be seen. But second, it raises a larger question: Is The Rehearsal itself a rehearsal for the show Nathan actually wants to make?

While that might sound like a playful postmodern question, there is something profound at work here. We never truly know what we are rehearsing for. In any creative craft, every action is both a reality in itself and a rehearsal for what comes next. Or, in more traditional theological terms: preparation, sanctification, a stage in the journey.

Abraham was seventy-five years old when God called him to leave his home and journey into Canaan. Seventy-five years old, and his life’s primary journey was just beginning. Everything before that was preparation for his later years. David spent years tending sheep and fighting off lions and bears before he ever faced Goliath or led Israel.

The rhythm of rehearsal and reality, of preparation and fruition, is woven into the sabbatical structure of reality itself. We live in continual cycles of work and rest. Every day we work, and every night we rest. After six days, we take a whole day of Sabbath rest. Each day is an end in itself, but it is also a preparation for tomorrow. The work you do today builds on yesterday, yet has intrinsic worth right now.

What, then, is the ultimate purpose of the show? Is it a rehearsal for the show Nathan genuinely wants to create? There is no ultimate separation between the rehearsal that is the show and the show he is rehearsing for. Every current creation is both a complete work in its own right and a rehearsal for the work ahead.

And that, my friends, is what The Rehearsal is actually about.

Watch the original episode.