anyone else watching Nathan Fielder's "The Rehearsal" season 2?

it's some of the most incredible television i've ever seen and I literally can't get anyone i know to watch it lmao

i love the show but i have no idea how to explain to people who have never seen the show (or any nathan fielder project) how its so good and worth watching

It's amazing. I assume HBO is just letting him do whatever he wants. I don't even know how you'd pitch episode 3 to a network exec.
Season 1 was good too, but covid definitely fucked up their plans.

I absolutely love how Nathan keeps blurring the lines between how the audience feels they are supposed to parse the narrative and how he is explicitly communicating it. The way he lampshades stuff while actively letting the audience in on the purpose of the lampshading (i.e. the clown stuck under the car bit from S2S1) is so genius because it makes you keep guessing and trying to outsmart him. The actor acknowledging the war room framing in the Paramount conversation was another example.
He's playing with us on so many levels that it's just unreal.

Absolutely amazing use of HBO money.
I'm trying to explain the premise to people I know but I'm doing a terrible job at it and no one is giving it a chance.
- I've tried the same and even describing a single episode is just....not doable

nathan is the best thing to come out of this fake ass country in many years. give him 20 seasons
- The fake ass country in this case is Canada
  
  From what I understand he got pretty good grades too

I really liked s1, and yall are just stoking the embers of motivation to watch s2
- S2 blows S1 out of the sky.
  
  I was really skeptical after s1. I LOVED it, but that final episode when the kid genuinely thought Nathan was his dad and couldn't separate the fiction from the reality, it really fucked me up. I'm just glad kids aren't involved this season so far.
- It's really something else

I really love the way the expansive HBO budget amplifies the comedic stakes. For example, we know that they really will pay for some pretty wild stuff, such as physically exactingly recreating a section of an airport with functional restaurants inside. That adds a funny sort of credibility to little gags like the "get the dog sniffing air from the right city" bit, which they obviously didn't really do and only needs to be communicated through a couple of quick insert shots of a truck and a guy with a hose, but your brain at least briefly accepts in a "sure, why not" way because of the context

Hell yeah and it's been amazing. Amy Lee has posted that she thinks he's a genius and also it turns out Captain Sully is very much still alive and really confused. The fact that he's still alive and Nathan did all this instead of just talking to the guy is pretty amazing.
- did all this instead of just talking
  this is like the premise of the show since season 1. it all started with a guy who couldnt just talk to his friend
- The fact that he's still Arlington and Nathan did all this instead of just talking to the guy is pretty amazing.
  He also built the airport and filled it with stalker-actors before discovering that the pilots don't even talk to each other before getting into the cockpit, which he'd already had made.
  Obviously it's gonna have a use later in the series but at this point in the narrative it was all pointless.
  
  If it doesn't come up later it's a good understated joke, if it does it's whatever that could be and at this point I have no idea what The Wizard of Lonliness will conjure. Kor said it in season 1, but I'll say it for a casting thing, Nathan Fielder would make an amazing Willy Wonka and it's too bad they went the standard direction with adapting it and hired Tim Chalet. Digressing aside, I'm happy with whatever he had my absolute faith. He's really tapped into something over the course of doing what he's done. I'm a generally more outgoing person and love to chit chat with strangers and the way Nathan has manged to generally humanize random ass people while also showing the weird vulnerabilities people tend to have at the tip of their tongue and has sharpened it to a social scalpel. People are neat. Sometimes they drink their own pee, sometimes they drink the grandson's pee, some crashed their scion TC at 100 miles per hour, some are banned from every dating site (ewww but ya gotta show everyone), some know the truth about haloween and some exorcist real estate agents are doing something about it. There is an empathetic vibe to the whole thing. There's an undercurrent of really caring in a way most people don't but presenting it in a really weird way. There's 8ish billion really weird fuckers out there and all it really takes is a camera crew and a few prompts to bring it out of most
- The fact that he’s still alive and Nathan did all this instead of just talking to the guy is pretty amazing.
  That's what I really want to know. Did he reach out to Sullenberger at any point? I feel like it would be REALLY in his style to make this entire episode, then bring Sullenberger in to watch the tape and give feedback/commentary on Nathan recreating his own life.
  I'm wondering if Sullenberger just declined to be involved or if they truly never contacted him before it aired. That'd be absolutely wild if the first time Sullenberger found out about this was 2 nights ago when it aired.
  
  I doubt they'll bring him on, they don't usually continue this kind of bit beyond its episode.

I am. It's great and I too have had no one follow up that they've watched. It's really good so far

I was waiting for the whole season to air, but should I just start anyway?
- I would. Each episode is really a lot to take in, I'm glad I've got a week between each.

- You should watch s1 before getting any further. True surrealist art.

This contest is over, give Nathan Fielder the ten thousand dollars!

When he started shaving his teats, I said aloud "what is he doing!" But then it all came together.

I have Rehearsal S1 downloaded and I'm pretty sure it was on Hexbear's recommendation...working through a few other shows right now, but I'll pop it in the queue
- Season 1 is also amazing. There really is nothing even somewhat like it

I haven't watched episode 3 yet. the paramount bit from episode 2 was absolutely wild though
- Episode 3 is PACKED. We're talking adult babies dog clones, diabetic attack reactments, masturbating in a plane, Cheryl Crow AND Evanescence
  
  holy fuck you weren't kidding. Nathan Fielder is a fucking genius.

YES. what an experience. so far my favorite part is the ::: spoiler spoiler canadian idol episode. The paramount nazi bit was so fucking funny, and seeing Nathan deliver that No at the end was the perfect ending :::
And I recently started playing FlightGear (open source flight sim). So it's really adding to the current obsession
- That episode was so wild. I was trying to explain it to my wife and she was like, "so he lied to these people to get them to audition?" At first I was about to agree, but like, he didn't lie? His only promise was that the winner would get to perform a public domain song on national television on an exact recreation of the Houston airport. And, like, he can deliver that quite easily at this point. He just created an entire reality TV show for a bit on a single episode.
  
  The whole bit about how he is lying and manipulating people is best explored in the Rehearsal's first season. The subtext is that people put on a thin performance on stage, and the situations he is "voluntarily" placing them in are very questionable when you consider the coercive power of a camera crew. There's an inherent mismatch between reality and reality TV. So how is any reality TV ethical? The more real it gets, the more exploitative! You can't capture real emotion and real stakes, especially when it involves children or people in trouble, without seriously compromising ethics.
  Maybe the whole point is encapsulated in the interaction in that episode where he is talking with the two ladies, and they ask if there is a prize and he basically just tells them point blank that the whole thing is a sham but they still go along with it. It's because people have to go along with it, you have a camera pointed at their face and you already made them jump through a bunch of hoops to get to that point.