I Became a Better Magician

Paul Thompson reviews Nathan Fielder’s “The Rehearsal.”

By Paul ThompsonJuly 2, 2025

• Television

AT FIRST, the premise seems to be: what bad ideas these are! Nathan for You, the faux-documentary series that ran on Comedy Central from 2013 until 2018 and introduced Nathan Fielder to American audiences, follows the desert-dry comedian, in character and perpetual Oxford shirts as a business consultant, as he gives advice to struggling petting zoos, failing haunted houses, a travel agency whose clientele is old and dying. On the surface, the show is a satire of the fresh-faced Yale grads McKinsey et al. send to slash expenses and fire swaths of workers in industries they don’t understand. Nathan (as in: Fielder’s on-screen persona during this era) straps giant balloons to heavier guests so they can ride horses without injuring the animals; he hires an Asian American stunt driver to combat racist assumptions about the valet parking situation at a nail salon. He tries to get Uber to change a policy by convincing the company that there’s a network of sleeper cell agents ready to sabotage it.

Over the course of four seasons, his plans grow more elaborate: a bar skirts indoor-smoking laws by classifying its patrons as actors in an experimental play, a diner sells its chili at minor-league hockey games by way of Nathan smuggling it past security in reservoirs taped to his body, which has been slathered in heat-resistant gel. The lengths he goes to in order to execute these harebrained plans become the joke, to the point where, by its end, Nathan for You is essentially a show about TV production. This is clearest during the fourth-season episode “The Anecdote,” when Nathan stages a preposterously involved string of events so that he can have a funny—albeit technically true—story to tell when Comedy Central books him on Jimmy Kimmel Live! to promote the very season of television we’re watching.

As in “The Anecdote,” Nathan for You sometimes abandons the premise of helping business owners entirely. What at first seems like unfussiness about conceptual consistency comes to blur lines between reality and performance: Wait, you might stop and ask yourself during that episode, what does Nathan think about his business-advice show being on Comedy Central?

And what, for that matter, did Fielder? By the time the series ended, he seemed to have grown restless within its confines. Its celebrated, feature-length finale, “Finding Frances,” follows (is about?) him marshaling the show’s resources to help an acquaintance find his long-lost love. In the previous season’s finale, “The Hero,” Nathan had tried to “improve” a man’s life by impersonating him, in expensive prosthetics, and striking up a relationship with a woman as he planned and executed a high-wire walk between buildings in Downtown Los Angeles—all while the real man was stashed away in a trailer in the desert, having been flown there in a helicopter with a black bag over his head, as if the CIA were producing MTV’s Made.

“The Hero” raises sincere questions about the notion of the self—what are we if not the sum of what others believe we’ve done?—but is too overtly silly to transcend its makeup department. “Frances,” by contrast, functions like a 2010s indie film, its drone footage of the American South warm and contemplative even when punctuated by shots of Fielder and his acquaintance sitting behind a card table, holding auditions for a fake movie in the hopes of gaining access to a closed high school campus so they can flip through yearbooks. Is his acquaintance the 78-year-old Nathan sees in front of him? Or the 25-year-old he recounts in conversation—or the 25-year-old who emerges in the increasingly frustrated letters sent to him decades ago by the woman he’s now chasing? The three men are different in stark, sometimes troubling ways, which we brace for because of the episode’s sobriety. It’s merely, though tidily, poetic that Nathan knows this man as a professional Bill Gates impersonator—tidier still that when they visit the man’s family in Arkansas, the idea that he was ever making money pretending to be someone else comes as a total surprise.

There’s the old maxim: we judge others by their actions, ourselves by our intentions. Usually, it’s deployed as a moral reminder, to be both gentle to others and rigorous with yourself. Fielder’s work is an attempt to strip from that divide any sort of value judgment, to confront the seemingly unbridgeable gap between our inner selves and the selves that emerge through social interactions charged and mundane. This disconnect has consequences even in the most trivial situations: people seeking a partial rebate on the price of gas, men killing time while their wives and girlfriends shop. But drama is about exaggerating the everyday in ways that make its contours clearer. So what if we made all of this life-or-death?

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In the summer of 2019, Fielder signed a one-year overall deal with HBO; two summers later, the network announced that it had finally ordered The Rehearsal, described at the time as a half-hour series that “gives people the opportunity to rehearse for their own lives.” When the show premiered in 2022, it carried the overwrought TV production from the latter half of Nathan for You to extreme, painstaking lengths. In its first episode, crew members, posing as technicians investigating a gas leak, photograph a man’s apartment in order to recreate it on a soundstage, all so that Fielder (and an actor hired to play the man in question) can rehearse his meeting with this man—who in turn will be given a chance to rehearse his confession of an incredibly low-stakes lie to a member of his bar trivia team.

That first episode teaches the audience the language and logic of the show—a language and logic that includes the auteur on-screen, far more sober (and, seemingly, more transparent) than in his prior work. Of course this is not Fielder the private person. Still, the character adopts the pose of someone who will level with the audience where Nathan for You’s Nathan did not: he talks about HBO and refers to Nathan for You as a comedy series. He’s subdued, he’s starting to gray; he paces around his sets with a prop that became immediately iconic, a harness that holds his open laptop near his chest as one might an infant.

The bar trivia gambit turns out to be a one-off. The season’s remaining five episodes are primarily about a woman named Angela who is considering becoming a single mother in her forties. The production builds her a dream home in relative isolation in Oregon and gets to work rotating in a series of child actors (both to age them quickly and to satisfy labor laws) to play Angela’s fictional son, Adam; replacing the seedlings in the garden with mature vegetables overnight; pumping in artificial snow to mimic the change in seasons. When a potential co-participant bails, Fielder—or, you know—steps in to see how he would like the experience of parenting. He finds it difficult to stand up for himself and his values against Angela, something his real-life parents note during a stilted picnic on the fake Oregon lawn has been a pattern in his actual relationships. (Fielder is divorced.) At the season’s end, it’s revealed that one of the younger child actors, fatherless, has started referring to Nathan Fielder as his dad since the boy’s stint on the show ended, a revelation that sends (at least) Fielder the character into a spiral of guilt over having made the show in the first place.

In The New Yorker, the critic Richard Brody lamented the first season’s gaze, which he called “arrogant, cruel, and, above all, indifferent.” Brody was correct to identify as The Rehearsal’s central quality the particular kind of scrutiny it directs at its subjects. But his diagnosis always seemed, to me, slightly misapplied—and oddly credulous about how the show functions. It seems plain, from the beginning of the series, that the show’s primary subject is not, as Brody alleges, a filmmaker’s smug satisfaction at his own ingenuity, but a character’s (or perhaps even that filmmaker’s) naivete in believing that this approach can truly solve that unbridgeable split between the public and private self. Fielder stands in front of a bank of monitors displaying feeds from security cameras in an artificial house and frets about how he can get this woman, who believes Halloween is a plot concocted by Satanists, to respect his desire for their fake son to learn about the Maccabees. These are people who can be odd, or rude, or ugly, but they’re trying to solve problems, to be happier—to connect.

What Brody also seems to misread is that, in Fielder’s work, the presence of TV cameras not only exaggerates the normal social pressure to be agreeable but also acts as a distinct phenomenon. In The Curse, the 2023 scripted drama Fielder created and wrote, which starred Fielder and Emma Stone as a craven couple with an HGTV show, this effect is shown to work in both directions: Fielder’s character is just as bullied by the camera when he’s behind it as when he’s in its crosshairs. In Nathan for You, he would slip little asides into his voice-over (“We found a doctor who would allow our cameras inside”) to underline how cameras fundamentally alter behavior. That show’s strangest episode, and clearest articulation of its belief that people will do anything to be on TV, is “The Claw of Shame.” Nathan slips into the filmmaking language of an overdramatic network reality show and creates a scenario in which a robot—so as not to implicate any of his crew members—will pull off his pants, exposing himself to a group of children and causing him to be registered as a sex offender if he can’t free himself from handcuffs in time.

This is a joke about the arbitrary stakes television puts on people for our entertainment, sure. It’s also yet another bit in which Nathan gets to do something incredibly specific and difficult, in this case actually learning how to slip out of handcuffs, in service of a television show. But those elements are overshadowed by one that’s downright sinister—and, in an impressive sleight of hand, does not for the moment feel like it implicates the artist.

As Nathan prepares for the stunt, he speaks with the parents who have volunteered their children to potentially see a grown man naked from the waist down. “[B]efore we begin, I just wanted to give you some assurance,” he says. “We’re going to be blurring all your faces, so you don’t have to worry about […] co-workers being like, ‘Why did you let your kid do that for a hundred dollars?’” Scathing. But when his character at the end of The Rehearsal’s first season is trying and failing to explain to a crying boy that he is not, in fact, his father, the audience is prompted to ask a similar question of Fielder: And how much did they pay you?

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The Rehearsal is a deepening of the project begun in Nathan for You, and its second season, which aired this spring, is a shocking escalation. Rather than exploring one woman’s waffling about whether or not to have children, this one interrogates the breakdowns in communication between airline pilots that lead to deadly crashes. It is extremely funny: in its opening moments, a captain and first officer disagree about the best course of action during a simulated flight and go down in LED flames—from which a solemn Fielder emerges like a Lucifer of middle management, armed with that laptop harness. But what is at stake are thousands of lives; in season two’s first episode, his “character” frets about whether someone who is famous as a comedian will be taken seriously as he tries to solve a truly grave problem. And so, while the production lengths to which the second season goes—those simulated flights, the actors on stilts and robots who breastfeed so Fielder can approximate Sully Sullenberger’s childhood—are still played for laughs, they also have a pretty inarguable justification.

The season also adds an acidic new element to a mix that already includes social nicety and the gaze of a camera: the incentives to conceal one’s mental health struggles. Early on, Fielder makes a point of noting that airline captains and first officers responded to the show’s call for interviews at a rate far exceeding that of any other profession; many interviewees are eager to stay on the phone or on Zoom, talking about their lives, their hopes, their anxieties. Later, when he’s parsing Sullenberger’s opaque autobiography, he explicates what’s going on here: pilots who admit to depression, anxiety, or any number of other disorders on an official document—or, say, see a psychiatrist—can have their licenses revoked.

Fielder’s own career in television is also given poignance. Before Nathan for You, he was a correspondent on This Hour Has 22 Minutes, a long-running Canadian comedy show; he was discovered for that gig while still working his day job as an associate producer on Canadian Idol. Talk about “arrogant, cruel, and, above all, indifferent”: his account of running auditions for aspiring singers is almost unbelievably grim. So when he sets up a fake singing competition of his own (to serve as a laboratory for communication by airline employees, who are meant to deliver the bad news to hopefuls who don’t advance), he also has those who are cut from the show-within-the-show rate their judges’ likability, on slips of paper that are fed into a wooden box, as they leave the audition.

Reviewing the scores—and seeing that he’s been rated poorly—Fielder says, in a somber voice-over, that he has “always felt that sincerity is overrated.” He goes on: “It just ends up punishing those who can’t perform it as well as others.” The audience is primed, then, to see his reaction to the next auditionee as insincere. But when he tells a 15-year-old girl that, while he can’t let her advance to the next round, the quality that led her to actually show up and perform is likely to make her successful, the exchange is genuinely moving. On the way out, she gives him a rating that reads as either a six or a nine out of 10, depending how he turns the paper.

The Rehearsal’s grand reveal is that the real Nathan Fielder has been training as a pilot for years, in hopes of better understanding the dimensions of the safety problems airlines face. Once we know this, we also know what it means for the rhythm of a television season: he simply has to land a passenger jet. And while he has earned certain certifications, it would still take thousands of flight hours and endless bureaucratic sign-offs for him to legally fly passengers. The loophole, of course, is television. If the passengers are considered actors, the only obstacle between him and flying a 737 full of people is finding that 737.

Fielder crisscrosses the world looking for a plane that is plausibly safe yet not owned by an airline. (“What happened with the plane that was from the Congo?” he asks, by this point bored, over speakerphone while pacing the perimeter of a backyard pool.) Throughout Fielder’s oeuvre, a lifetime in TV is betrayed by the ease with which he can slip into virtually any mode of contemporary filmmaking. This is true of abbreviated gags like “The Claw of Shame” or Nathan for You’s parodies of The Bachelor and teen-focused reality shows; it’s there in The Curse’s horrifying lurches between HGTV and sub-Lynch dread. Season two’s finale, “My Controls,” adopts a time-lapse autodoc posture that seems to signal the artifice is being stripped away. Your mind flashes to all the news coverage his Nathan for You stunts received from unwitting evening anchors. Surely Nathan Fielder couldn’t, wouldn’t, fake the attendant certifications and public records that come with becoming a pilot. Right?

We learn that Fielder was an impossibly bad student, his flight instructors flummoxed by his inability to land. What finally got him over the paralysis he felt was imagining himself as a different, fictional pilot, one who was not only totally proficient but also Zen about it.

Fielder goes to Nevada because there’s a facility there that offers him the quickest path to 737 certification. One-hundred percent of the training is on a simulator. When he has finally completed the course, he treats himself by going to a magic show on the Vegas Strip. Over footage of him in the audience, we get more voice-over, this time about his struggle, as a young magic enthusiast, to act naturally in front of an audience. He had to train himself, he says, to act like everyone else. You expect that he’s going to say that this made him feel either closer to or more alienated from his peers. He does neither. Instead of the experience, he talks about the effect: “it helped me become a better magician.”

Earlier in the season, an autism specialist commends Fielder for The Rehearsal’s depiction of experiences that many autistic people find difficult. Fielder has never been diagnosed as autistic, and balks—for comic effect, to be sure, but maybe not entirely—at the suggestion that he is. The specialist shows him an old diagnostic tool called the “Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test,” which shows slivers of a person’s face and asks the respondent to choose one of four descriptions of the pictured person’s emotions.

As he prepares to fly a passenger jet full of people, Fielder once again finds himself paralyzed, this time by an FAA questionnaire that asks about anxiety, depression, and other emotions. He knows that being totally forthcoming about every bit of angst he’s felt would disqualify him. But he’s not a doctor; aren’t his anxieties and depressive blips reasonable responses to stimuli, to circumstance? He gets an fMRI, hoping hard biology will bring him answers; it can’t be read fast enough to offer any guidance before submitting the FAA form.

Fielder clicks the buttons he has to click. He makes arrangements to fly a plane full of actors in a loop over the Mojave Desert. Each of these actors is asked to audition for his or her “role” (“And your line is gonna be, Diet Pepsi, please”); when Fielder explains the plan and says it’s totally understandable if any of them wants to opt out of a flight piloted by a famous comedian, none do. The auditions, naturally, are filmed. In order to round out his flight crew—and test his hypothesis that role-playing exercises can help break through the unspoken tension that inhibits necessary communication in the cockpit—he chooses as his first officer someone who has aspirations to work in TV, and therefore might be nervous about contradicting Fielder or embarrassing him.

The plane takes off; it lands. At the episode’s very end, over footage of Nathan Fielder flying for a company that moves decommissioned jets all over the world, we hear him making an argument: “They only let the smartest and best people fly a plane of this size. And it feels good to know that. No one is allowed in the cockpit if there’s something wrong with them. So if you’re here, you must be fine.”

Just a few minutes prior to that montage, we are shown Fielder receiving a voicemail from the office of the doctor who ordered the fMRI, asking him to come in and go over the results. He deletes it, then watches from the wings as a young woman, lured here by the possibility of stardom, celebrates her triumph in the singing competition by performing in an exact replica of a Houston airport terminal for an audience of airline employees and actors. For a second, Fielder’s eyes are framed exactly like those of the men and women in the diagnostic test. Can any of his co-producers, the HBO executives who financed this, or the people assembled parse them? Can he? Can you?