I watch TV for a living. This episode is the craziest thing I’ve seen

This story contains spoilers for episode three of season two of The Rehearsal.

I have a high threshold for the absurd. As a kid (yes, I was too young for it, blame my dad) I grew up with Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson, who took deranged pleasure in beating each other senseless on the BBC. My teenage years were spent singing about soup and eels with The Mighty Boosh. One of the best things I watched in my 20s was Paul Scheer and Jason Mantzoukas guessing the contents of a dumpster on The Chris Gethard Show. And one week after giving birth, I nearly did damage to myself uncontrollably laughing at Tim Robinson not knowing how to work his body in a virtual-reality supermarket on I Think You Should Leave.

As deputy TV editor of this masthead and someone who’s professionally written about pop culture for more than a decade, I watch a lot of comedy. But none of this prepared me for the latest episode of HBO docu-comedy The Rehearsal, in which Nathan Fielder – a 41-year-old man – shaved all the hair off his body, put on a nappy and a harness to propel himself into an oversized cot and re-created the life of Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the beloved pilot who landed a passenger plane on the Hudson.

Nathan Fielder in The Rehearsal.Credit: HBO

Whether you’ve seen the series or not, it’s difficult to describe the context for this – a scene so ornately staged and deadpan in its delivery that I literally screamed while watching.

Stranger still: it wasn’t even my favourite moment of the episode. That was Fielder’s reveal of a (not unconvincing) theory that a 23-second silence in the famous plane’s black box recording is explained by Sully listening to the chorus of Evanescence’s 2003 goth-pop hit Bring Me To Life.

Speaking to Vulture, Evanescence singer Amy Lee called the moment “so beautiful”, adding that the show is a moving portrait of human vulnerability and a worthwhile interrogation of airline safety (this season is focused on Fielder’s attempts to prevent real crashes). “It’s just blowing my mind,” she said. “He’s some kind of genius.”

Separate to all that, this 34-minute episode also includes Fielder spending four months training one of a couple’s three cloned dogs to behave like their deceased pet with the help of half a dozen paid actors and a man transporting air from the city where they once lived.

As our critic put it in his four-and-a-half-star review of this season, “No one else is making television like this [and] that actually might be for the best.”

Nathan Fielder in The Rehearsal.Credit: HBO

Fielder has been making outrageous and genre-defying TV for more than a decade now. In Nathan For You (2013-17), he created a bizarro reality/stunt show dedicated to boosting small businesses in absurd ways. That included exploiting parody laws to open a cafe called Dumb Starbucks (styled exactly like Starbucks) and, after finding out his favourite jacket company platformed a Holocaust denier, launching “the first outdoor apparel company to openly promote the true story of the Holocaust”.

In 2023, alongside indie filmmaker Benny Safdie (Uncut Gems), Fielder made his first fully scripted show with The Curse – a masterclass of cringe comedy/drama centred on a fictional lifestyle show which had the most confounding season finale I’ve ever seen. To this day, I’m not convinced the series (which Fielder starred in with Emma Stone) isn’t an elaborate sketch for a new show we’re yet to see.

Then there’s The Rehearsal, in which Fielder has seemingly received a blank cheque from HBO to follow his strangest whims to their extremes. Season one was predicated on creating elaborate rehearsals for people to practise difficult situations – first, building a replica of a bar for a man to tell his trivia team he doesn’t have a master’s degree; then building an entire life for himself to practise becoming a father, resulting in a child actor developing a confused attachment.

Naturally, there are questions about whether Fielder’s work is exploitative of its subjects – normal people reaching out for a glimmer of fame or connection. But there’s also a deliberate lack of clarity about what’s real and what’s not.

Bogdon and his cloned dog - plus the three actors tasked to shadow him.Credit: HBO

I have no interest in knowing for sure. The magic of this insane performance art is in the mystery, and the thing that elevates Fielder’s work above that of other absurdist comedians is the humanity behind it all – the preoccupation with real ambitions and emotions and insecurities, the belief that the childless couple cloning their dogs really could be real.

Ridiculously, I’ve contacted Sully for comment. I’ll let you know if he gets back with a review. But for now, you’ll have to take mine: this is the best thing on TV.

The Rehearsal is streaming on Max.

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