Nathan Fielder is currently doing victory laps after the conclusion of the second season of HBO’s The Rehearsal—including, yes, the part where the comedian revealed that he’d spent two years getting genuinely licensed to pilot a 737 and then flew a crew of 150 actors above the American Southwest. But while reviews have been glowing, the Federal Aviation Administration has been more critical of the show’s findings, leading Fielder to publicly call the regulatory agency “dumb.”
The man behind Dumb Starbucks was on the set of CNN’s The SituationRoom, alongside frequent Rehearsal participant (and actual airplane safety expert) John Goglia, when hosts Wolf Blitzer and Pamela Smith brought the FAA’s response to the show up. Basically, the agency says it already trains pilots to deal with the potentially fatal communication issues the series highlighted, and also discounted Fielder’s claims that these issues often contribute to crashes. Fielder, in his typically deadpan fashion, pulled no punches: “That’s dumb,” he declared. “They’re dumb.”
“Here’s the issue,” Fielder continued. “I trained to be a pilot. I’m a 737 pilot. I went through the training. The training [for interpersonal communication] is someone shows you a PowerPoint slide saying, ‘If you are a co-pilot and the captain does something wrong, you need to speak up about it.’ That’s all. That’s the training, and they talk about some crashes that happen, but they don’t do anything that makes it stick emotionally.” He also pushed back, albeit more gently, on suggestions from Rep. Steve Cohen (who appeared on the show’s fifth episode) that Fielder essentially tricked his way into a meeting with him, with Fielder noting that he was trying to draw links between masking in people with autism and co-pilots refusing to speak up in the cockpit. Fielder also suggested that Cohen himself might be uninformed on the issues he’s trying to highlight. “Look, I wasn’t going to bring that up, but he seemed to like come at me a little, so…”
It is, if nothing else, always fascinating to watch an inherent provocateur like Fielder work in a medium where he doesn’t control the edit. Watch him try to push Brown to admit that there’s an intimidating power dynamic at play in her working relationship with Blitzer. (“He’s in movies!”) Or his repetition of calling the FAA “very dumb,” and the ways he tries to get Goglia—who, as one of the main characters of this season of The Rehearsal, is one of Fielder’s subjects by default—to co-sign the sentiment. It is, in other words, an extremely Nathan Fielder performance: Deadpan, seemingly sincere, but with subtle lines of comedy running throughout. (His insistence on referring to the 737 flight he piloted as “The Miracle Over the Mojave,” and that he “saved” 150 lives by successfully landing the plane, looks to be the closest Goglia ever comes to cracking, for the record.)
