Three weeks ago, I received an email from Amy Gravitt, the head of comedy at HBO. She was wondering if I wanted to sit down and talk with her and Nathan Fielder about the new season of The Rehearsal.
This was something I very much did not want to do.
I once had lunch with Gravitt in Los Angeles a dozen years ago after she read my book, The Magical Stranger, that dealt with the death of my Navy pilot father, Commander Peter Rodrick, in a crash off the USS Kitty Hawk. To understand his life and death better, I pulled a Fielder and in 2010 embedded in the lives of Commander Hunter "Tupper" Ware and other naval aviators in VAQ-135, my dad's old squadron, as they flew missions "up the avenue" from the Persian Gulf to Afghanistan. I did not cut corners, deploying with the Black Ravens for a month, passing a rigorous swim survival test and eventually getting up for a flight where I flew upside down over Mount Rainier.
Before comedy, Gravitt had been a naval officer on the USS Constellation and both her father and brother had been navy pilots. I remembered her saying she learned more about the pilot life from my book than from her own family.
Much has changed since then, both happy and unbearably sad. I had a son in 2013 who happened to be born on Nov. 28, the anniversary of my dad's crash. Amy's brother Michael died by suicide in 2023, reeling from mental health issues that had ended his second career as an airline pilot.
"This was after he flew commercially throughout the pandemic, an incredibly isolating time," Gravitt tells me. "And, you have to understand that flying is the only thing I ever remember him wanting to do. Since he was a kid, he wanted to go to the Naval Academy and become a navy pilot. My understanding is that there was a day in the fall of 2022 where he was supposed to go in for a simulation, and he couldn't do it, something he'd done a million times before. But, he didn't feel like he could talk to anyone about it. And my parents called me one day out of the blue, and said Michael's not doing well. And nothing could be more shocking. For a short time, we had some of the closest conversations of our relationship, talking about our childhood, talking about everything. I thought he was doing better. And then, in August of 2023, my mom called and said he was gone."
Michael's death happened while Gravitt was overseeing the second season of The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder's cracked-fun-house mirror of performance art where cringe comedy collides with personal improvement. As it happens, the show's second season centers around Fielder's longtime obsession with plane crashes caused by poor cockpit communication, specifically junior pilots being afraid to speak up when their captain was making questionable decisions and flying their aircraft into fatal peril. (In theory, a junior pilot can take control of the airplane if they think their captain is flying dangerously. In reality, this is fraught with career-killing implications.)
After Gravitt's email, I watched the show's first episode. Fielder recreates multiple dysfunctional conversations between pilot and co-pilot before their plane explodes into mountains, trees, and land. He watches the re-enactment impassively from outside the cockpit, typing on a laptop strung over his shoulder as if he were a cigarette girl at a 1970s nightclub. I could feel my heart beating faster and my face went flush. I turned it off and went outside for air.
Years before I started working on my book, an acquaintance in Senator John McCain's office pushed through the bureaucracy and got me a declassified copy of my dad's accident report. It was 1979 and the hostages had just been taken in Iran and the Kitty Hawk was steaming toward the Persian Gulf as your standard American show of strength. Fearful of being tracked by Soviet spy trawlers, the carrier's commanding officer instructed all aircraft to turn off their radar altimeter, a device that gives a precise reading of altitude more accurately than the standard barometric altimeter. Being off by 50 or 100 feet isn't a big deal when you're flying at 10,000 feet, but my dad was flying at 200 feet, skimming the ocean at 500 mph. All that was found of his EA-6B Prowler was an oil slick and bits of a white helmet bobbing on a blue sea. The report suggested he caught a wing as he banked into a turn. But that wasn't what changed my world. The report implied that my father was flat-hatting, flying below clearly stated regulations. The fact that he was the squadron commanding officer likely prevented the other three junior officers on the plane from speaking up.
"There was one officer who wouldn't fly with your dad," a member of his squadron told me in 2012 as we sat in a Newark Airport Hilton Garden Inn on a rainy day as he enjoyed a day off from his FedEx pilot duties. "The guy knew it would probably kill his career, but he felt something in his bones."
The information altered my vision of my father. Before, he was a Naval Academy whiz kid who, legend has it, tutored Navy quarterback Roger Staubach in calculus and was one of the youngest squadron commanders in the Navy. Now, I had to confront the idea that his recklessness had created four widows and five fatherless children.
I thought I'd said goodbye to all that in my book and had little desire to revisit it. But then I watched more of The Rehearsal. Describing Fielder's sometimes bleak, sometimes hilarious show to the unwatched is like trying to catch water with a net. Let's just say Fielder's recreation of pilots' struggles includes but is not limited to dozens of actors playing roles from passengers to security personnel in a replica of a terminal at Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport, three cloned dogs, autistic kids, and Fielder's rebirth as baby Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, the pilot who landed a US Airways plane on the Hudson without any loss of life.
Fielder's intricate and sometimes inconceivable work reminded me of Brian Wilson's Smile session where the mad genius played his piano in a sandbox. The key difference being Fielder actually finished his masterwork. The chef's kiss in the season finale is the reveal that Fielder spent two years getting his pilot license and was eventually approved to fly a 737. He dodges and ducks a potential autism diagnosis -- a much-written theory about Fielder's social interactions that potentially could get him grounded from flying. Eventually, he takes the actors from the show for a two-hour flight.
Gravitt thought my background might lead to an interesting conversation, so I met with Fielder and Gravitt in her HBO office, sitting in the chair where Fielder first pitched the Season Two idea back in 2023. Fielder was dressed L.A. casual in a gray crewneck sweater, athletic pants, and running shoes. He was more forthcoming and less inscrutable than his image, with a few notable exceptions. Still, I did make sure to stagger our trips to the HBO washroom in respect to both his and my neuroses.
The three of us talked for two hours. Here is an edited version of our conversation.
Tell me how this idea started forming in your head.
Fielder: I've had this weird fascination with commercial aviation disasters for almost 20 years. There was a show in Canada that would talk about crash investigations. The thing that really fascinated me at first is that when a crash happens, how much effort the NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board] or the investigators in whatever country it happens in put into making sure that whatever caused it does not happen again. I started to notice they're really good at fixing these technical things, but the human stuff seems to keep happening over and over again. For years, I would say to friends of mine if I needed a conversation topic, "Hey, did you know that there's this thing that happens in crashes where one person might understand that there's a problem, the other person sees it differently, and the person that maybe has the better path is afraid to vocalize?"
"I've had this weird fascination with commercial aviation disasters for almost 20 years. "
Gravitt: That question became the pitch for this season.
Fielder: When you think about the person flying your plane, you don't want to really think about them. You want to think they're just a perfect person who is fully confident and knows what they're doing in every way.
You don't want to see them at the Hilton bar the night before.
Fielder: Well, you don't want to see them at the Hilton bar, but you also just don't even want to think about the idiosyncrasies they have that aren't even problems, like they make too many jokes. I think the show is about how much of your true self you show and how to compensate for that with other means while having the fear of what others might think of you.
I was intrigued by how enthusiastic the pilots were about participating. In my book, I wrote about Tupper, who was the skipper of my dad's old squadron and how other officers were coming up to him saying, "I can't believe you're letting someone else follow you around. He's going to hold your career in his hands, and you're just going to tell him everything about how lonely you are" and this and that.
But I think he felt grateful he had someone he could talk to who was not a licensed therapist, which would go on his permanent record. (The fear of being grounded for a mental health issue is a constant fear of pilots and is explored by Fielder in The Rehearsal.) That seems to be the case with many of the pilots who participate in your show.
Fielder: Going into this, I was like, "Are any pilots going to want to be a part of this, given the tone of the show and what it's like?" But to our surprise, people were so game and really wanted to talk to us. They started texting the producers and sort of being like, "If you want to talk more I'm around."
Did you have any interest in learning to fly before?
Fielder: No. Before I even told this idea to Amy, I was like, "How real is this or how prominent is this thing? Is this very rare?" And so, I started learning to fly. I was insecure of the fact that I am just a comedian and no one will think I'm trying to explore this in a real way. And so I wanted to be able to talk to pilots and say, "Hey, I'm a pilot, too." And I could actually talk and understand their experiences in ways that an outsider couldn't.
It was so scary for me to do that. But the second I showed up and started interacting with people I started to see the way communication happens and I'm like, "This is happening all the time." And you're not always in an emergency scenario, so it doesn't matter. But the things that would be bad in an emergency were there.
Give me a specific example about communications issues from your flying experience.
Fielder: I can get paranoid that people aren't being honest with me. So, if I sense that from someone, I'll be like, "Tell me." I'll try to create an environment that invites honest feedback. Because that's my biggest fear is if someone's upset or there's something that needs to be talked about and they're not sharing that. [In the series finale, Fielder repeatedly insists his co-pilot tell him everything he is feeling as he flies a 737.]
Then I had a scenario that was with an instructor I only flew with once, who's not featured in the show. After you get your private pilot's license, there's something called an instrument rating. And that's where you learn to fly in cloud environments. But you have to be on a very specific flight plan to go into clouds. You can't just go into clouds by yourself. You need to be on an instrument flight plan. This flight, we weren't on an instrument flight plan, and we were too close to the clouds.
And I was like, "Should we be this close?" And he was like, "Well, that's not really a cloud." And I was like, "I think it is a cloud." And he's like, "No, no. I can see through to the other side, so it means that it's not really a cloud." And I was OK, because he knows more than me and I trusted him.
And so, we flew into the cloud and we didn't come out and we couldn't see. And I was like, "I think this is a cloud." And he's like, "We'll pop out soon, don't worry." And then another 10 seconds passed and we didn't. And I'm looking at the instruments to make sure, because you can spin out and things can happen. And I was panicking because I knew how wrong it was.
And these things don't get talked about. And I didn't tell anyone this. But what could I have done? I had my private pilot's license, so I could have said, "I'm uncomfortable with this. I'm taking over the controls," but I sort of yielded to his authority. And I thought, maybe this guy just made a mistake and he had a bad day. But he didn't acknowledge after that, "Oh, that was wrong. I'm so sorry." So I was just like, "Ugh." But I didn't say anything.
I mean I literally am doing a show on this thing, and I let the guy fly me into a cloud and my life is on the line, and I didn't stop it. Everything was happening that I knew was happening, but the pressure of that moment had me questioning my own --
I had that experience in my book, not just with my dad's crash but with Hunter, the skipper of the squadron I was writing about. The squadron was flying off the USS Nimitz after seven months to Naval Air Station Whidbey Island where they were based. It's a big deal. You do a flyover of the base before you land and your kids and your parents, everyone's there. It was an extra big deal for Hunter because it was his last big flight before he got booted up to a desk job. But he was sick as a dog. He had a 102 fever and was puking before he got on the airplane. He landed safely. Everything was fine, but every junior officer I talked to was like, there is no way in hell he should have been flying. But they just felt like they couldn't speak up.
Gravitt: Nathan, would you speak up now?
"I literally am doing a show on this thing, and I let the guy fly me into a cloud and my life is on the line, and I didn't stop it. "
Fielder: I don't know. If I'm still junior to the other pilot, I think I would still defer.
When did you guys have your first conversation about basing the second season around pilots?
Fielder: Amy called me up before Season One had finished airing, and she said, "We're going to announce a second season." And I was like, "I don't have an idea. Should we wait?" And she said, "You'll figure it out." For a while, I thought about another thing. Can we go off-the-record? [Fielder tells me of his other idea that may still be in play for a future season. Just the concept is appropriately surreal and astounding.]
Fielder: Months passed because I shot this other show [The Curse with Emma Stone] in between. So my mind was off it for a sec. Then in February of 2023, I came to Amy, and I've been flying for a month and a half at this point. At that point, I couldn't land the plane. I was still just learning how to turn the plane probably. But I'd been recording some of my lessons just because I knew, "Oh, if we do this, this will be interesting."
And I showed her some of the footage of me trying to understand this world. And I thought it was really interesting, because here I am, I'm trying my best, and safety is at stake, and I'm really trying here, and I'm overwhelmed in these circumstances because it wasn't a natural thing for me.
Are you immediately having conversations about how we can do this in a meaningful way, but also funny?
Fielder: Oh! I thought you were saying let's pause the interview. And I was like, "Yes, you're right. This is not funny enough." Anyway I said, "Did you know that the number one cause of commercial aviation crashes is this [communications]?" The number one contributing factor -- it's not the sole cause, but it's a contributing factor. And Amy was like, "I didn't know that. That's interesting."
I told Amy that no one wants to think about what's going on with pilots. And Amy was like, "You know, I'm from a family of pilots."
Gravitt: So my dad was a Navy fighter pilot and he flew F-4s and A-4s, and was commanding officer of a reserve squadron in Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach. And my brother then went on to go to the Naval Academy and fly C-2s and C-9s in the Navy. And when it came time for me to go to school, I decided that I wanted to go to Duke and, in order to do that, I applied for an ROTC scholarship and joined Navy ROTC at Duke. And when I graduated, I did not become a Navy pilot, but I joined the Supply Corps and then was stationed on an aircraft carrier at the USS Constellation down in San Diego and was on a deployment with your friend Hunter.
Did your father or later your brother talk about, "Oh, I had a hairy night coming back to the carrier," or was it not really talked about?
Gravitt: I never heard those stories.
Nathan, I've enjoyed your work, but when I heard what the subject of this season was, I couldn't imagine how it could be funny.
Fielder: I totally get that. And yeah, the show opens with recreations of real people who died in crashes. And as you put these things together and as you are shaping the story, in the planning stages or in the edit, you sort of think, "OK, this is heavy. There haven't been any jokes." That is my insecurity. So if I'm watching something for long enough and I'm like, "This isn't that funny," I feel like I need to say it out loud. [Fielder does this about 10 minutes into the first episode.]
I don't want to just do a serious thing because that's not really what I do best. But every time you go into a new thing, there's a huge chance it's going to go so badly and that you won't get the tone right. Because the tone always ends up being different than I picture it. You can sort of nudge the tone a little or juxtapose things in a different order, but it sort of feels how it feels, and you have to be like, I guess this is what it is.
Because my dad was a navy pilot, I'm always early to things. Just before we met, I was sitting down in my car in the garage looking at a Reddit about the show and some people were writing, "Listen, he doesn't care about the issue. It's just a launching point for him to do the show." And the other half were like, "No, no, man, he did all this research."
Fielder: Just because this has been in my head that I've been, for just a few minutes, I've been like, "I need to mention this." But I know I talked about this flight instructor with the cloud. The people who trained me to fly were really good, and all my instructors were very, very, very good. Even though this guy was good in some ways, I'm not going to fly with him again. And that incident doesn't reflect on the people who taught me.
That will be conveyed.
Fielder: OK, so I'm doing the pilot training and I witness these communications in the cockpit, so I'm like, this exists and it exists at every level and it exists in every industry. At the beginning I was like, "Oh, maybe we will look into other industries, too." But I feel like if you take any two random people and make them talk, it will be the most uncomfortable thing you've ever witnessed. I worked on Canadian Idol and I actually used to do that. I'd pair up two contestants and I'd put a camera on them. I'd be like, "OK, just talk." They never put it in the show, but to me it was really funny because they just couldn't.
But you wanted people to take you seriously, right? A major thread of the season is just trying to get Congress to hold a hearing on these issues.
Fielder: Well, I want to keep making jokes while being taken somewhat seriously. When we were putting this together, that was an uphill battle, a real problem to overcome for me. And I thought, "Well, this is actually a challenge because of how I'm viewed, so this will be interesting."
The first episode features the recreation by actors of actual communication or lack of communication between the pilot and his junior officer that led to these disasters. I wonder if there was one in particular that really stood out and left you thinking, "Wow, I can see why this happened."
Fielder: The one where the guy created a dynamic of, "Oh, I want it to have a jokey vibe."
[The captain tells the co-pilot, "You gotta have fun," and how he can't wait to get a Philly cheesesteak. Visibility drops and the co-pilot says he "can't see shit." The captain replies, "Because you're a bitch." The plane crashes seconds later.]
I've been in conversations with people like that, where I feel like they want to have it more jokey, and I'm intimidated because I can't always be like that. Especially when I was younger, I felt a pressure to not want to be a stick in the mud. All the interactions feel like they aren't specific to cockpits and flying. When someone is like, "Let's do that, let's joke," they are setting the tone and the tone can be very oppressive to an environment.
I was just in Japan, and it's a totally different atmosphere there based on how everyone communicates. And you just sort of adapt to what's around you. I think everyone sort of does it.
No, this is good. Obviously the final episode when you disclose you're licensed to fly 737s is quite the shock.
Fielder: Initially I thought being a pilot was going to be more part of it, not just the end. We have a lot of [footage of] me talking to pilots throughout about my experience as a pilot, and we made a choice in the edit to take those interactions out. And basically we thought, it's going to be better story-wise to leave this for the end.
When did you decide to fly the 737 with passengers as part of the show?
Fielder: I wanted to get to a place with my license where I felt like I understood things. Because if you just take a couple lessons, you just don't know enough. If you get a commercial pilot's license, you can't fly the big planes, but you can fly. I wanted to know enough to be able to understand them, because a lot of these pilots are right after that level.
They're young.
Fielder: They're young, and they have to get a lot of hours. But when you have to build hours to get to the 1,500 hours that you need to fly for an airline, a lot of people are flying alone -- if you're in a small plane, you only need one pilot. So a lot of flying has no interaction component.
You go right from the simulator to flying a plane with passengers and the social aspect becomes so important. It's almost like Covid or something where people forget how to interact.
One of the themes of the show is that pilots are closed off and won't talk about their problems, whether for personal or professional reasons. Amy, you told me your brother had just reached a point psychologically where he couldn't get into the simulator anymore and that he stopped flying. He took his own life in 2023. I can't imagine dealing with this subject right after losing your brother. Did you ever feel like, "I give the show my blessing, but I just can't handle the subject matter?"
Gravitt: I never thought about not doing the show. I do remember when we went to dinner a couple months after he died, we were able to talk about what had happened and how it related to the show, and we agreed that we would take it as it came.
Fielder: When Amy told me about her brother, I remember saying to her, "We don't have to do this season if you don't want to." And I was a little joking, but not fully joking.
Gravitt: I feel like not doing this season would have been doubling down on everything we're talking about and the conversations that people aren't having. Do I think that if my brother had seen this season of the show that he would still be alive? No. But it's important.
Tell me what it was like watching Episode Three which will always be remembered for the way that Nathan inhabits Sully Sullenberger's life but is also about pilots shutting down and not dealing with their mental issues.
Gravitt: It was a year and a half after losing Michael, and I watched it and sobbed. I had a lot of the reactions everybody else did to the big set pieces of the Sully story, but it was so grounded in a tragic experience of mine that ultimately, I don't even necessarily think of that as much as I do the therapist's office at the end, and pilots going in. [The episode features a heart-wrenching montage of lonely pilots talking to Fielder's staff about their lives, desperate to communicate their problems as long as it is out of the standard mental health community.]
I also feel a lot of relief for them when I watch it. It's that simultaneous feeling of relief for the pilots who are able to talk to Nathan, and sadness, because one of the things that I think about when I think about my brother in the end was how alone he felt.
Nathan, when you were reading Sullenberger's book were you struck by how much he dismissed any trouble he was having in his life?
Fielder: Not right away because at first it was just sort of like, "OK, yes, this is a pilot who did the right thing in terms of trying to open up the channels of communication. This is interesting. What would it look like if you took on his personality?" And so you're reading the book to understand living his life in chronological order. But then we started talking about, well, why is he including these moments? Because some were so odd, like putting rocks in his sister's mouth. I was like, "Why is this in a book?" And he would have a way of talking about a story after it happened, if it was sort of a bad thing, he would try to be like, "Yeah, it was bad, but it really wasn't that bad." And he'd try to undercut the actual drama of his life in this interesting way.
Gravitt: He's creating order in his brain.
Fielder: It made us look into, well, what is he trying to avoid here? We've talked to these other pilots who are saying this is a big issue with pilots -- they can't talk about these things.
Gravitt: Stephen, it makes sense to me, though, how you were talking about Hunter being willing to talk to you. It's very public, but somehow it's safer than talking to somebody in your inner circle or a peer.
Nathan, I think this is important because of where the episode ends up.
OK, on to some of the most remarkable filmmaking that I've ever seen. Did you fear that the breastfeeding scene where the mother is a giant puppet and you're wearing a diaper as Baby Sully might overwhelm everything else?
Fielder: Yeah, I mean everything could have been a huge disaster. With every joke you're like, is this too dumb or is it not? And sometimes it's not dumb enough. You can make that mistake too, where it's too subtle and people don't even understand what you're trying to do or something. And this is impossible to convey and people might not believe me, but when that puppet was holding me, I did feel like a mom was holding me. It was cozy. And you feel a big hand patting you. And these visual illusions for me, being in this set, work better in weird ways than you would think. You're doing these exact recreations, and it does something to the tone of the whole thing that I can't quite explain. There's a point, too, where if you try hard at something, people are like, "Well, this is dumb." But then if you try even harder, then people are just like, "I can't even judge. I just need to watch because of the effort that's put in."
"With every joke you're like, is this too dumb or is it not? And sometimes it's not dumb enough. "
The one thing that I want to know just as a viewer, because it seems so real at the moment, was the milk coming out too fast? Is that why you said "Fuck"? I mean, were you literally choking? Or was that a line?
Fielder: No, I didn't know how that was going to go. We had a rig that they showed me how it was going to work. And I was like, "Let's just do it." And then we just did it, but I didn't think through enough to "OK, I have no control over stopping this breast." So when I would put my mouth over it, it was coming in faster than I could swallow. So it just came out too fast, but I was like, I don't know, maybe this is what it's like for a baby. But it was oat milk.
This season, you play off the fact that people have theorized that you might be autistic. Was that a means to an end, or did you feel comfortable doing that? (In The Rehearsal, Fielder tries to get a congressional hearing on pilot communication. When he realizes a key congressman is on both on the aviation safety committee and a member of the Autism Caucus, Fielder becomes a member of an autism advisory board. Fielder gets a brain MRI but doesn't receive the results until after the 737 flight and, when he does get them, he clicks off a voicemail message before getting any details.)
Fielder: It felt like an interesting way to describe what might be happening as it relates to the acting stuff, the ability to be your true self or not. And that question of sincerity, or how to appear sincere, and how people tend to judge others, and what they judge others based on. And I think pilots are doing that and I think a lot of people are doing that.
And these things are out of your control. They're not things you can practice for. These are just parts of who you are. You could try to be like, "No, I'm not having that thought. I'm not having that bad thought." I don't know what the answer is really, but going through that experience and going as far as I did with the pilot stuff, I feel it. I understand it in a way where it's a powerful force. And it seems to be directly related to maybe what pilots are experiencing.
But are you trying to say anything personally about yourself?
Fielder: I'm trying to ... I don't know.
OK. That's fine. You've been very forthcoming. If we hit on a stumper, that's OK.
Gravitt: There was a real reaction from the autism community to the first season of the show.
Fielder: The first season of the show, there were all these articles. It's interesting to read that and see that. I sometimes find it amusing. Whenever people tell me about how I am, I think it's interesting. People are evaluating me through a TV show that's edited. And as much as you try to control things about yourself and your image, certain things seep through that you can't control. But you're also trying to control things with how you shape a story and all that.
Amy, what was your reaction when you watched cuts from the show?
Gravitt: When I met Nathan, never in a million years did I think that he would zero in on this subject, and then at the same time, I would lose my brother to suicide based on a lot of the conversations that he's tapping into. I know how important it was to him when I sat in the edit bay and watched them.
Fielder: I was so nervous to send the episodes to Amy, especially number three and number six, because I know what she has gone through, and I'm sensitive that this has converged in some way. My biggest fear would've been to violate that trust or let her down. And so it was a big relief when she said, "It's really good, it's really good," after she watched the final cut.
Gravitt: I was sobbing. To sit and watch that and both be so overwhelmed because there are small moments in it that make me think of my brother, but also being proud of the work that he's done and the years he put in. I don't mean to sound like I'm a parent, but I feel that way in this situation.
Fielder: We're trying to make the person watching a TV screen and probably on their phone at the same time feel something. And if you can do any of that, that feels like a win these days.