The rehearsal seemed to follow an impossible action. Nathan Field has a plan.

Nathan Fielder believes in the second chances. With its dizzying, complicated layers of nested simulations and annoying ethical provocations, his HBO series The rehearsal It seemed to be an impossible action: a landmark, maybe even a masterpiece, but not a repeatable phenomenon. When plans were announced for a second season on the eve of the show final in August 2022, it was difficult to know what to think. How could another season possibly repeat the Protean in -forecast of the first replica, its mixture of Deadpan comedy and postmodernistic carpets? Could this be another of the complex conceptual pranks of fields, such as the sale of outdoor clothing, to sharpen the Holocaust Consciousness? How can you see the disorientation, something you have never seen before?

The answer of The rehearsalThe second season that has its premiere on Sunday evening is: you don’t. This does not mean that his six episodes are not full of unusual surprises and sudden curves, starting with an opening scene that immerses the spectators in the cockpit of a commercial aircraft, which explodes shortly afterwards in a fireball. (All six episodes were sent to critics in advance. I only discuss the first in detail.) This time, Fields seems less interested in provoking the complaints of his audience than to chat as his own, even if the on the screen itself remains almost blind in advance.

Where Nathan started the first season, how we started to call his persona in front of the camera, help strangers to navigate unpleasant social situations, and in one case to build an unnecessarily detailed replica of a bar in Brooklyn to help a man with a friend to play the second season, play a much more targeted fixation: aircraft. The opening scene is not surprising, this time, this time a catastrophe in real life, with actors reciting lines from a black box of a dilapidated aircraft. (The setup is similar to the stage play and the film Charlie Victor Romeowhose dialogue consists exclusively of the exchange of cockpit language recorders.) When the aircraft-actually a mocked cockpit with a large curved screen-the first civil servant assumes that the aircraft is no longer on the way and warns the pilots of the presence of a low hill close to the airport. But the pilot overwrites its second command, and within seconds alarms and the screen are filled with a rolling flame cloud. And there is Nathan because he stands like an indifferent angel at the gate of hell to observe unpassive how his actors get limp in their seats.

“I have to have fun”-a title from the almost burdened words of a fatally inattentive pilot sets up several plane tortures in a quick episode, all of which are characterized by the failures of the pilots to consider the warnings of their first officers. (In one case he snaps: “I am the pilot, idiot.) In his bass-heavy voice-over, Nathan informs the audience that after years of studying the subject, he came to the conclusion that one of the main causes of aviation disasters in the cockpit is poor communication. Speaking or not being able to be in a stressful situation that you have never experienced.

The problem is that, as Nathan admits, he is “both the best and the worst person to solve this problem.” The best, because nobody understands the strategies that develop deeper and dramatizes more effectively to avoid direct confrontation. In his series Nathan for youThe lack of confrontation is part of the joke that most of the American spectators introduced Fielder’s comedy brand: he shows no bar owner how to fight anti-smoking regulations, but gives an ingenious way to handle them by staging Happy Hour as a game for an audience of two years. To The curseHe played a Henpeck husband who was so intended not to weigh his wife that he hovered into the stratosphere. With The rehearsalHis obsession to help others take their fear into account is clearly a deputy to manage his own, that is, for everyone except Nathan on the screen. The Nathan of the first season seemed so overwhelmed by the prospect of everyday social disagreements that some spectators speculate that the true field player could be in autism spectrum, although his preference for distraction and indirect disagreements simply arise from the fact that it originally arises from Canada, a country that is due to the fact that it is due to aggressive aggression as also tend to be out of the tendency. It feels like a clever nod on its roots that the first plane crash in “Gotta Have Fun” is a Canadian flight that crashed on the way to Nunavut.

As for the worst, now, he is a comedian who has built his career on the hooding civilian. When he calls a large airline to ask whether you are interested in his experiment, the best thing that Nathan can offer is a promise that the company will be “a bit sincere”. He may have access to HBO’s checkbook and like his neighbors on Sunday evening, John Oliver, is enjoying how much of the network of the network he can spend-but he still does a comedy show, no matter how many pilots in real life and former national transportation safety board, which he penetrates into his constantly growing plan. “You may think you can revolutionize the security of the airline,” Nathan notes with a reputable voice-over, “but you can’t take this thought too seriously because nobody else will be.”

Nathan’s wish to be taken seriously can even be a sophisticated provider. The rehearsalThe second season touches the decades of personal history of the field player, including his childhood obsession with magicians and his early job as a producer at a low level on the Canadian version of American idol. But it is never clear how much of himself really reveals and how much he only plays with the idea that artists are exposed to their work. Nathan is unbearably confident, but he is strange in every respect and is missing in self -confidence. In the way, he is emerging how the problems of his pilots could overlap with open communication with difficulties in their dating life, but even if he draws an analogy with his own failed relationships that have “crashed the hardest”, he does not seem to completely connect the points. It is painfully obvious to the audience that he projects his personal problems into the world, whereby the forced universality of his story is used by the second person-“to talk to other people is never easy, no matter how close to them”-to avoid the possibility that he is actually not like everyone else.

At a time when comedians are asked to be twice as a cultural perception, the idea was mocked that the comedy has something to do important– At the same time, they all touch topics that are really important. But it is impossible to say whether the indication of this fact means that you get the joke or the butt of it, and maybe there is no way to do one without being the other. At the end of season second, Nathan gets the press coverage of the first, the dozens of articles and thousands of words, not some of them published in Slate to explain how significant and groundbreaking the series is. (He skips those who accuse him of ethical violations, even though he has learned to keep children out of the mixture this time.) He is flattered, but he is also confused, especially because so many of the takes contain the poisonous bottom of his person on the screen. Maybe we take Nathan Fielder to seriously? Next we will do better Time.