The Rehearsal Season 2 Premiere Puts Nathan Fielder In A Creepy Ethical Dilemma

Nathan Fielder spends the first ten minutes of “The Rehearsal” season 2 premiere with seemingly good intentions. He’s studied the cockpit transcripts leading up to multiple plane crashes, and he’s deduced that interpersonal anxiety between the pilot and co-pilot is the biggest factor at fault for them. Very quickly, however, Fielder dives into murky territory: he hires his actors (trained in “The Fielder Method” from season 1) to study the employees at George Bush Intercontinental Airport. 

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This includes TSA agents, shop workers, flight attendants, and of course the pilots themselves. For the pilots Fielder has his actors follow them onto their flights, and then follow them to their hotels when they land in other cities. We’re treated to one clip, filmed from what seems like a body cam, where an actor knocks on a real pilot’s hotel room door. He pretends to be a previous guest who left something behind in the room, and he asks the pilot to let him rummage through his room for it. The pilot, whose face is not blurred for the camera, agrees and lets the actor come in and discreetly study his belongings. 

It’s a scene that immediately raises two questions: 1) Is this legal? And 2) If it is legal, which of my congressmen should I call to fix this? 

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Reality prank shows like this are usually allowed to show footage of people when they’re in a public place, which the airport itself qualifies as. But is the pilot’s hotel room still considered a public place? Legal issues aside, I think we can all agree that this behavior is crossing a few ethical lines. I don’t think anyone would appreciate finding out that a complete stranger has been following them around all day, studying their mannerisms in order to portray them in a TV show. 

It helps that we know “The Rehearsal” isn’t always 100% honest about what’s real or not real, so we can assume (or hope) that these people the actors followed around for days were more aware of the situation than “Gotta Have Fun” makes it seem. Still, the show’s total disinterest in elaborating on this is intentional; Nathan makes clear throughout season 2 that he needs this show needs to be comedic and entertaining, and the joke of this sequence is that we’re supposed to laugh at how invasive and obsessive Nathan’s being in pursuit of his goals. 

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Of course, not every viewer can find the humor in this. When season 1 came out, New Yorker film critic Richard Brody lambasted the “cruel and arrogant gaze” of Fielder. “Deception prevails throughout,” he wrote. “Fielder sets up a fake website in order to lure a woman named Tricia, to whom Kor is planning to make his confession, into the project unawares (and the deception goes far, even to a faux job for her); we never find out when she learned what she’d been roped into.” Brody went in on hard on Fielder, refusing to overlook the many invasions of privacy and trust that Fielder went on to accomplish his goals. 

I largely agree with Brody’s moral concerns about Fielder, except for the part where he claims that Fielder is uninterested in addressing those moral concerns. Season 1’s fourth episode, “The Fielder Method,” is jarringly meta in how introspective the show’s willing to be. Fielder roleplays as one of the real people he got on the show, an aspiring actor named Thomas. Nathan tries to experience for himself how the whole shady, exploitative practice feels from Thomas’s perspective, and his discovery is deeply unflattering to himself.

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The sequence points out how Fielder’s production team pressures people to sign an “appearance release” that is way too long and complicated for most of them to parse through. Then, just to really underline how messed up this is, we watch as Fielder pressures one of his “Fielder Method” actors to give him the keys to his apartment. We then watch as Nathan combs through this stranger’s apartment all night and then sleeps in his bed, despite telling Thomas he’d only stop by to water his plants. 

Nathan’s actions throughout this show are creepy, but they’re supposed to be creepy. The comedy comes from just how disturbed Nathan comes across, and his apparent lack of self-awareness over it. Nathan’s character doesn’t seem self-aware but the show itself sure does in the way it depicts him; the only question is whether that self-awareness is enough. If the show is still exploiting real people for entertainment, as it sure seems to be doing to at least some extent, doesn’t its self-awareness make it even worse, not better?

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There are two saving graces of “The Rehearsal” season 2 so far, thankfully. The first is that it never feels like the show is making fun of the people whose privacy it breaks. For instance, the pilot who gets tricked into letting an actor with a camera into his room is not the butt of the joke. The audience is expected to sympathize with him, and to be concerned by what the actor (and Fielder) are doing. 

The other saving grace is that Fielder is (allegedly) only violating these strangers’ trust and privacy for the sake of the greater good. Preventing future airline crashes is a noble task, assuming Fielder’s serious about it. I think most people would forgive Fielder’s transgressions if his experiment actually wielded positive, meaningful results. If Fielder actually somehow manages to make modern air travel less terrifying, he can violate my privacy as much as he wants. 

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