'The Rehearsals': The craziest thing ever seen in the history of television

If you want to know what the craziest thing ever seen in the history of television is, you can watch all six episodes of the second season of The Trials (Max) or read this article to the end . The actual dementia appears in the last episode, but it's not certain you'll be able to make it through the previous five without feeling overwhelmingly uncomfortable. Nathan Fielder , the show 's creator, is a comedian— a completely unfunny one , who seems to record conversations and stuff birds in his spare time. They call it "post-humor."

Fielder's post-humor spawned a show of his own name, which we've missed here, a series with Emma Stone that was, of course, very unpleasant ( The Curse ), the production of that genius that is How to with... John Wilson (HBO), and, finally, The Essays , a series halfway between Jacques Derrida and MasterChef. If trash becomes sophisticated, does it stop being trash? This is indeed what French thinkers have been asking themselves for decades.

The Rehearsals , in its first season, proposed a disconcerting approach to the concept of mimesis, playing with the correspondences between original and copy. Look, don't worry: the guy simply reproduced spaces and situations in an HBO hangar, so some poor wretches could rehearse things they were afraid to try, like motherhood or confessing their academic achievement. Imagine a boy who wants to tell his parents he's gay, but doesn't dare. Fielder helps him, in exchange for selling his privacy globally , of course. So, he recreates his parents' house in minute detail, asks two actors to spy (literally) on his parents and study their characters so he can present himself to their son as if they were them, and then "rehearses" the confession of his sexual orientation with the boy.

These techniques led to a first season of The Rehearsals that was far more reminiscent of the humiliation of ordinary people we find on talent shows and other reality shows than French sophistication. It even disgusted me.

However, the second season is much more complex , much less damaging to the honor of others and, in the end, the biggest stupidity that a human being has ever done in the history of television .

The season begins with fake commanders and co-pilots reproducing, in an equally fake cockpit, the last words exchanged by the real commanders and co-pilots who crashed their planes . The famous "black box," yes. In all these last words ("novissima verba," we learned from Antoine Compagnon what this could be called), we sense that a clear reason for the disaster was that the commanders and co-pilots don't understand each other; the former disrespects the latter, and the latter, even knowing they're going to crash, doesn't warn the former because he's scared. Fielder decides to make an HBO series to reduce the number of plane crashes.

The essays , therefore, are about the lack of communication between copilots and commanders , which may lead you to wonder: what do I care? The series makes you care a lot. In fact, it makes it fascinating.

Fielder, the star of his own show , has an entire airport rebuilt , complete with every last detail, in the large hangars HBO lets him rent. He then fills the fake airport with actors imitating passengers, pilots, and shop assistants. In this setting, he introduces a real copilot and follows him to find out how he behaves, when he loses his assertiveness in the face of the captain he's flying alongside, and how to solve all of this. The series drags on because, to solve all of this, Fielder even ends up creating a musical talent show .

He also rehearses his own presentation before a commission on air disasters in the United States Congress, in front of fake senators, a fake audience, and in a painstakingly faked setting. There comes a point where you don't know what's real and what's HBO; who's an actor and who's a pilot; or why this is considered a comedy, given that you laugh roughly the same as at an Antonioni film.

Finally, Nathan Fielder surprises us: he's been taking a light aircraft piloting course for two years. Seeing him aboard one of those flimsy aircraft, which he isn't particularly good at handling, is incredibly stressful for the viewer. But things could get worse.

Suddenly, Fielder realizes that improving communication between pilots in the cockpit to reduce accidents requires him to actually fly a passenger jet himself and experience "from the inside" the stress of a commercial flight with hundreds of passengers in his care. Can an HBO moron who's taken a short airplane course pilot a commercial jet?

Yeah.

I repeat: yes.

The United States has more cracks than the Spanish public companies we plug into, my dear friends , and it turns out that Nathan, if he has the money, can just buy a secondhand Boeing 737 with a capacity of 300 people and pilot it as he pleases, provided he hasn't charged those 300 people anything for putting their lives in danger. The entire crew will be actors, so it's not like much is lost if it crashes.

This madness closes The Rehearsals : a comedian pilots a 737 after a month of experience in a simulator . It takes off and lands. Strangely, he doesn't go to jail.