Nathan Fielder doesn’t just court controversy – he dives headlong into it, daring audiences not to cringe, not to be outraged. On Nathan for You, this mostly manifested in him taking advantage of the politeness of small business owners, who allowed him to go forward with his cockamamy profitability schemes just so he could make a TV show that’s at least somewhat dependent on their bewilderment/embarrassment. As with any sort of art or content that relies on an element of “pranking” people on camera, Nathan for You was packed to the gills with ethical quandaries, but anyone looking to justify their enjoyment of it could easily rely on one key principal: nobody was forcing these people to be on television. There were no hidden cameras, no fraud was committed – the people who appeared on Nathan for You did so willingly, signing away their image and likeness to a comedian. They entered into an agreement that serves as the basis for countless hours of 21st century entertainment: if you want to go on TV, if you want to take your shot at being famous, you have to expect that you might be made to look like a fool. That’s the deal. 

But baked into Nathan for You, and later on The Rehearsal, seemed to be a corollary that Fielder added into this agreement: wanting to be on TV is not a natural thing, and, under certain circumstances, you should be punished for it. Look no further than the Nathan for You episode “Hotel/Travel Agent.” Seeking to attract more families to a hotel in Pomona, California, Fielder proposes that the owner offer an “isolation box” complete with sound proofing that parents sharing a room with their children can put their kids in while they have sex. To test the box out, he hires a child actor who sits inside it while, mere feet away from him, two porn stars do what they do. Fielder assures us that the parents of the child know what’s going to happen, and, initially, they insist on being in the room while the test plays out. But as the sex gets more and more intense, and as the adult actors begin calling each other by the parents’ names to make the test “more realistic,” they leave the room – asking if their son has a way to get out if he’s uncomfortable, but still leaving him precariously close to a full on hardcore porn scene. Fielder escalates the situation by following up the initial experiment by adding five more actors for an orgy scene which, again, the child actor’s parents seem concerned about, but never concerned enough to extricate their kid from the room.

Obviously, the primary purpose of this scene is to be funny. But it also portrays the child actor’s parents as either too polite, too embarrassed, or too shameless to put the kibosh on a situation that most parents would not be ok with. Fielder only goes as far as he does because they allow him too, and when given the choice between potentially traumatizing their child or giving him a few minutes of screentime, they opt for the latter. It’s more than just an uncomfortable situation – it’s an indictment of people who want to put their children on TV, and the risks they’ll endure to make their or their kids’ dreams a reality. 

Fielder steps up this critique in “Pretend Daddy,” the final episode of the first season The Rehearsal, his follow up to Nathan for You. After renting out a house in Oregon and hiring a small army of child actors to help a woman named Angela “rehearse” being a mother, Nathan decides he wants to also rehearse being a father. Even after Angela leaves the show, Nathan continues with the rehearsal. Eventually he develops a relationship with a child actor named Remy who plays his hypothetical son Adam. The six-year-old boy, who’s being raised by a single mother, grows attached to Fielder, referring to him as “daddy” even when the cameras stop rolling. In an attempt to figure out how such a predicament could be avoided in the future, Nathan stages another rehearsal, this time with him acting the part of Amber, the child’s mother. Throughout his portrayal of Amber, Nathan hints that he thinks blame for the child’s confusion should at least partly fall on her shoulders. As Amber, he films the child’s “audition” tape, smiling in triumph, and brushes off his “mother’s” concerns about whether or not the kid is “a little young to get into acting.” In the tearful conversation with his “son” that closes the episode, Fielder/Amber concedes that the show may have been “a weird thing for a little kid to be a part of.” Throughout, the score is dark and churning, implying that this is a bit more than an innocent mistake. There’s something sick, something twisted going on, a corruption of what a parent should be doing for a child. You could easily make the argument that Fielder helped enable this by putting out the casting call in the first place – something that Fielder does indeed seem conscious of. But none of these parents forced him to make their kids audition for the show. Nobody deceived them about what it would actually entail. In Fielder’s moral logic, that makes them fair to ridicule. A nuanced, complicated ridicule, but ridicule nonetheless. 

What’s striking about the second season of The Rehearsal is the way that Fielder seems to abandon this thirst for judgement and use his powers and budget to genuinely try and help people. Maybe that’s because, instead of satisfying a personal fantasy, Fielder sets out to find a way to prevent commercial airline disasters by improving communication between pilots and first officers – an ostensibly selfless goal. But even with that in mind, it’s still striking to see a comedian who has made his name on giving people the time and space to make themselves look ridiculous and, at times, deplorable, take a more earnest tack on The Rehearsal. He still searches for discomfort-spawned laughs, but he gets there in this most recent season by displaying a kind of empathy that was largely absent from his previous work. 

That isn’t to say that there aren’t people this season who Fielder doesn’t relish making a fool of, like Jeff Wulkan, an airline pilot (and former would-be reality TV star) who says he’s been kicked off of every dating app and is either proud of or completely oblivious to his general offputting, seemingly misogynistic demeanor. But Fielder doesn’t make him the focus on one particular episode. Instead, Jeff is contrasted with Mara’D, a female pilot who catches Nathan’s attention because she receives high ratings from eliminated contestants on Wings of Voice, a fake singing competition show Fielder creates to evaluate a suite of pilots’ likeability (as with seemingly everything Fielder does, this season of The Rehearsal gets very convoluted very fast). Through Mara’D, Fielder explores the core of his season’s purported theme – how can first officers stand up to pilots when they believe they’re doing something unsafe in the simultaneously macho and socially awkward world of aviation? So often, Fielder uses extreme examples to tell some kind of truth about everyday life. But in Mara’D, someone he notices primarily because of her personable, approachable demeanor, he uses an ordinary person to highlight a situation that’s seemingly absurd yet also crucial. He takes an abstract concern found in nearly all of his work – how can one meaningfully relate to other people – and applies it with the life and death stakes of commercial air travel.

But he also leaves room for more intimate concerns. Another pilot who catches Fielder’s eye is Colin, an awkward 20-something who admits that he finds dating difficult. When Nathan runs through a series of techniques he hopes will make it easier for Colin to date, what stands out is how Colin is not necessarily the butt of the joke. Yes, his nerdiness elicits laughs, but he isn’t put on camera for the purpose of being skewered the way other subjects of Fielder’s have been. It’s clear that Fielder sees something in Colin that he didn’t see in the parents of the many child actors he’s interacted with, or even in Angela, the woman who he helps “rehearse” raising a child in The Rehearsal’s first season. Perhaps this implies that there’s a latent narcissism that prevents Fielder from fully relating to anyone who seems too different from himself. But Fielder’s stated goal to make Colin feel more comfortable in his own skin stills feels pure enough, or as pure as a show like The Rehearsal can hope to achieve. 

The truest test of Fielder’s seemingly newfound altruism comes in season 2’s penultimate episode, when he discovers that some autistic viewers related to the first season, and plans to use this to finagle a meeting with Tennessee Representative Steve Cohen, the Ranking Member of the House Aviation Subcommittee. To establish himself as a “thought leader” on autism, he visits Center for Autism and Related Disorders where founder Doreen Granpeesheh notes that the replica of the Houston airport he constructed would be an excellent tool to help autistic children practice going to a real life airport. Fielder says that, after last season, he pledged not to use children in his show, but eventually relents. The next few minutes of the episode are some of the tensest Fielder has ever filmed, if only because one wonders the firestorm he’ll be walking into by inviting not just more children, but autistic children, into his show, and whether or not he’ll be able to resist the urge to try and deploy them in a comedic set up. But he’s wise enough to resist the urge, and the ensuing visit by a group of autistic children to what’s dubbed “Nathan’s Airport” is a success, a legitimately heartwarming step on his way to landing an awkward, unsuccessful meeting with Cohen and ultimately failing to get the audience with the subcommittee he was looking for. But, despite that failure, the “Nathan’s Airport” moment demonstrates that he was able to do some good along the way. 

“Empathy” is one of those words, like “trauma,” that’s been overused in cultural discussions to the point of cliche. But it is striking to see someone like Fielder, whose past work has relied so heavily on exploiting people’s own vanity for laughs, take the turn that the second season of The Rehearsal did. Fielder’s own concerns about his potential placement on the autism spectrum, and his use of his part time aviation career (as I said, things get predictably weird this season) to reassure himself that he’s “fine,” reveal that he’s not entirely an altruist – or, at least, that he doesn’t view himself as one. But, in a paradoxical way, the world is too complicated to wave off the good that someone might do (or at least, try to do) on the way to satisfying their own ends. 

Nathan Fielder is still a comedian first and foremost. But adding this new angle to his already unique style – discovering that he can draw just as many laughs relating with people as he can ridiculing them – promises to add a richness to Fielder’s already layered work. After all, the man learned how to fly a 747 for a TV show – who knows what else he’s capable of.