The Rehearsal gets indirect win as Mental Health in Aviation Act passes in House

It's not explicitly clear that Nathan Fielder's advocacy helped move the bill along, but we don't know that it didn't help either.

By Emma Keates  |  September 12, 2025 | 1:18pm
Photo: HBO
TV News Nathan Fielder
The Rehearsal gets indirect win as Mental Health in Aviation Act passes in House

We’ll have to wait a few more days to see if Nathan Fielder can rustle up an Emmy for The Rehearsal, but the show nabbed a different kind of win earlier this week. On Monday, members of the House of Representatives unanimously passed the Mental Health in Aviation Act, a piece of bipartisan legislation that would force the FAA to overhaul its current practices around pilots’ mental health, CNN reports. As anyone who watched the second season of The Rehearsal will know, certified airline pilot Nathan Fielder is obsessed with aviation safety. The season was almost entirely dedicated to this cause, with Fielder making multiple attempts to testify about it on Capitol Hill. He hasn’t yet been invited, though some concerns he raised about cockpit communication did find their way into a House Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure session earlier this summer. It’s not clear whether the show held any direct influence on the passing of this week’s bill, but Fielder previously said former National Transportation Safety Board member John Goglia (who was featured in the season) thought it “pushed” young staffers to advocate for the legislation.

The bill seeks to amend a current “culture of silence that is affecting safety” among pilots, according to National Transportation Safety Board Chair Jennifer Homendy. Currently, as The Rehearsal demonstrated, pilots are hesitant to disclose mental health issues for fear that it would affect their career. “This often leaves the folks tasked with keeping our skies safe with an absolutely terrible choice: get help, and put your career and your paycheck on hold, or keep your career on track and just hope you’ll get better,” said Illinois representative and bill co-sponsor Sean Casten in a statement. “It doesn’t make our skies safer but it does lead to horrible and avoidable tragedies.” The bill would force the FAA to address a backlog of pilot medical certifications as well as hire FAA physicians with mental health backgrounds. It now moves to the Senate.

In addition to the show, Fielder previously addressed the issue in a CNN interview in which he called the FAA “dumb.” “I’m a 737 pilot. I went through the training,” he said, referencing his jaw-dropping finale stunt. “The training is someone shows you a PowerPoint slide saying, ‘If you are a copilot and the captain does something wrong, you need to speak up about it’… They don’t do anything that makes it stick emotionally.” You can watch the full interview below:

 
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