“You said it’s a documentary?” “I would use that term loosely, but yeah,” comes the reply. Nathan Fielder is on the phone, trying to convince a press representative for United Airlines to give him and his crew permission to film in the private areas of airports—or so we think, until he gets up from his desk and walks down the hall to an identical room, this one done up with United Airlines posters and corporate memorabilia. The person on the other end of the line looks up—she’s an actor dressed in business casual who has been playing the United rep. “Thanks, I think that’s good. I’m gonna call them for real now,” Fielder tells her.

This is the premise of The Rehearsal: One can better manage life’s most stressful moments by preparing via highly realistic practice runs. In the first season of the series, that meant helping a trivia whiz come clean that he’d lied about attending grad school and staging a months-long re-creation of a Brooklyn woman’s fantasy of homesteading and motherhood. In the second season, it’s plane crashes—specifically, Fielder sets out to fix a dysfunctional pattern in cockpit communications that he discovered while studying aviation disasters “sort of as a hobby.” The prompt scaffolds a sprawling network of bits and social experiments: a re-creation of “Miracle on the Hudson” pilot Sully Sullenberger’s early life starring a gigantic puppet mother opposite Fielder as the world’s most disturbing baby; an American Idol–esque singing competition that exists only to observe how first officers handle the task of rejecting auditioners; a tactic to build a subject’s confidence by surrounding them with actors who mimic their every move (Fielder calls this “The Swarm”).

Fielder is a familiar figure to a kind of extremely online comedy fan. Fifteen-year-old clips from his YouTube channel still regularly make the rounds; the deadpan, absurdist humor is remarkably consistent. His first big on-screen comedy gig was appearing as a correspondent on the Canadian show This Hour Has 22 Minutes, but he’s best known for the Comedy Central show Nathan for You, which ran for four seasons in the 2010s. It presented Fielder as a consultant helping struggling small businesses with out-of-the-box ideas—such as: Why not allow hot people to shoplift from your clothing store to attract a hotter clientele?—then going to insane lengths to realize them. Several of these bits made national news before their seasons aired, most notably a coffee shop rebranding as “Dumb Starbucks” to take advantage of a parody loophole in trademark law.

Still, some of the best Nathan for You episodes departed from this format, such as one feature-length entry that followed a lonely, vaguely creepy septuagenarian tracking down an old flame, then reconciling himself to omissions in his own memory of their relationship (namely, that he cheated on her). By the time Nathan for You ended in 2017, Fielder seemed less interested in the prank-adjacent business ideas than in this kind of freewheeling, searching, poignant and absurd character study, characterized by a willingness to depict his subjects’ instincts in an unflattering but deeply human light.

The Rehearsal furnishes that creative shift with an HBO budget. Its emotional tone is documentary-ish, but the heavy dose of producer manipulation qualifies it, like its predecessor Nathan for You, as reality TV. It’s somewhere between Punk’d, a Charlie Kaufman film, and a case study for an unlicensed, unethical new school of mischief-based therapy. The premise has the paradoxicality of a Zen kōan: To get closer to reality, The Rehearsal builds more and more elaborate facsimiles of it. It’s impossible to say whether the show is kind or cruel, earnest or insincere. But through discomfort and ambiguity, Fielder is trying to say, in the latest season of his show, something more profound: Our inability to hear unwelcome information is literally killing us. Perhaps comedy can help.

Any lover of reality TV has to reconcile how different it actually is from real life. I think of it like topiary: Reality TV producers prune the mess of human behavior into a shape meant to deliver formalized aesthetic pleasure, something wild and brambly sculpted into smooth, high swirls and spheres. Looking at a topiary garden, you might be charmed by its visual harmony or delighted by the clever work of turning branches into curves and straight lines, but you’re not mistaking it for a forest. Similarly, the end product of reality TV is several degrees removed from its constituent parts. The challenge lies in getting real people to act within the boundaries—to quip, to fume, to cry, to play the villain, to struggle and triumph—with enough authenticity that each episode can leave the editing bay feeling satisfying and complete in a way that real life never is.

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In this sense, The Rehearsal departs from its genre. Faced with thorny subjects, Fielder lets them shoot off into wild shapes; when he prunes, he shows himself wielding the shears. Dozens of shots show Fielder in the background of his otherwise painstakingly accurate reenactments, monitoring the proceedings, often with a laptop harness slung over his chest like a BabyBjörn. You get a near-constant stream of diagnoses about how the season is progressing, including admitted dead ends and failures. Fielder does not seem interested in coaxing the catharsis of fiction out of the entropy of real life; the show is allergic to those big, hyperreal emotions. Instead, The Rehearsal digs into the unsettling, occasionally revelatory places where the fictions that bolster everyday life break down. It’s awkward and cringe-inducing—but often electrifying, charging mundane events with a sense that anything could happen.

It helps that Fielder has a knack for finding true weirdos and getting out of their way as they monologue. A pilot named Jeff claims, “I’m not a psychologist, but I know how to read the room pretty well,” and then reveals that he’s been banned from “pretty much every dating app known to man”—Tinder, Hinge, Bumble, the sugar-daddy service Seeking Arrangements, plus Instagram. (He tried to get around the bans by using his mother’s phone number to make new accounts, but algorithms recognized his photos.) An actor describes, unprompted and in detail, her erotic feelings for Albert Einstein. A couple laments that the three Yorkshire terriers they’ve cloned from their original dog—which they considered their child—lack their beloved animal’s character.

For all its fake plane crashes and breastfeeding gags, The Rehearsal’s core is the tragicomic double bind that is the pursuit of self-knowledge. Fielder presents self-delusion as a site of immense danger (the kind that can bring down planes), but the alternative is no better: Reality is an impossible injury for the ego to sustain. The show initially focuses on interactions in which lower-ranking officers notice the captain making a mistake but are afraid to intervene, something Fielder claims is the “No. 1 contributing factor to aviation crashes in history.” But over the season, the scope expands: He manufactures a tense, probably helpful conversation between a young pilot and his girlfriend, rehashes his conflict with the streaming service Paramount+, and wrestles with the opportunity to gain enlightening but potentially disruptive information about himself.

The Rehearsal achieves some genuine insight, and watching people run from self-awareness is reliably very funny. Fielder’s biggest failure is his treatment of his female subjects, who represent a strange limit to the comedian’s curiosity about human behavior. A pilot named Mara’D proves preternaturally gifted at rejecting singing-competition hopefuls, and when Fielder asks about her method, she mentions that she’s faced enough workplace sexual harassment from captains to become adept at redirecting it. So he pairs her up with Jeff, the pilot banned from all dating apps, to observe how she handles the conversation. Jeff immediately asks a string of invasive questions about her sex life and offers to “hook [her] up” with his dad; she’s visibly uncomfortable, and the arc more or less ends there.

It’s not just Mara’D: An entire episode is devoted to manufacturing a kiss between a socially awkward young pilot and a female actor hired to participate in a role-playing exercise that exploits the queasy incompatibility of Fielder’s dual roles as documentarian and boss. There is a weird fixation on women cheating—the inane question of whether acting counts as cheating—that goes nowhere meaningful. It’s maddening to watch Fielder turn over questions that so deeply correlate to feminized experience and fail to make the connection. Delivering feedback while cushioning the recipient’s ego is one of many compulsory skills taught by female socialization; in his quest to master it, Fielder could save time by talking to any woman who’s ever been approached at a bar or dated a podcaster.

Both seasons of The Rehearsal bring to mind Janet Malcolm’s book The Journalist and the Murderer, the study of a nonfiction author being sued by his subject, a man convicted of a triple homicide, on the grounds that the author feigned a more sympathetic attitude than he really felt. To Malcolm, this kind of betrayal is an inevitability of representing another person: “The catastrophe suffered by the subject is no simple matter of an unflattering likeness or a misrepresentation of his views,” she writes. “He has to face the fact that the journalist…never had the slightest intention of collaborating with him on his story, but always intended to write a story of his own.” We endow the act of representation with a kind of hopeful magic, something that will affirm, beyond doubt, our charm or wisdom or importance. We expect to appear as flesh and blood; instead, what ends up on the page or on the screen is thin and partial, prosaic, mundane. Even if the facts aren’t wrong, the feeling is.

The Rehearsal brings this tension to the surface: It lives in the anxious space of reconciling one’s ideals with a reality that falls short. It’s a thorny enough feeling to power a show, but by the last episode—even if the finale succeeds in generating an amount of tension that may be medically significant for those with anxiety—The Rehearsal walks away from its loftier goals. Perhaps the task Fielder sets for him isn’t really achievable. We might not be able to live without our illusions; maybe all we can hope for is to understand what it takes to live with them.