In Episode 2 of Season 2 of Nathan Fielder’s HBO series The Rehearsal, the show pushes boundaries by connecting Fielder’s past work on Nathan for You to contemporary issues. The episode examines a problematic episode, "Horseback Riding/Man Zone," recently removed from Paramount+ due to sensitivities around anti-Semitism. Fielder discusses his successful charity brand, Summit Ice, which arose from the backlash to the original episode. With humor and satire, he explores how censorship impacts artistic expression, while using absurd scenarios to engage with the themes of sincerity and perception. The episode highlights the precarious balance between humor and meaningful discourse.
Warning: Spoilers ahead for Episode 2 of The Rehearsal Season 2.
In just its second episode, Season 2 of Nathan Fielder’s acclaimed HBO series The Rehearsal is already challenging the limits it can explore. This boundary-pushing is no surprise coming from the mind behind brilliantly unconventional projects like The Curse and Nathan for You.
Notably, an episode from Nathan for You—the mid-2010s Comedy Central docu-reality series where Fielder devised outrageous marketing stunts to aid struggling local businesses—plays a crucial role in the latest chapter of The Rehearsal. Following a premiere that highlighted the season’s timely focus on aviation safety, Episode 2 veers into unanticipated territory (typical of Fielder’s style). One significant diversion discusses how the removal of an episode from Nathan for You on its streaming service, Paramount+, ties into The Rehearsal‘s supposed goal of helping individuals navigate complex real-life challenges.
In the Season 2 premiere, Fielder put forth his theory that many plane crashes occur because co-pilots struggle to speak up to their captains when they believe something is wrong. In Episode 2, he sets the stage by paralleling these dilemmas with his own difficulty in confronting Paramount about removing Season 3, Episode 2 of Nathan for You due to “sensitivities.” In the 2015 episode, entitled “Horseback Riding/Man Zone,” Fielder, who is Jewish, collaborated with a rabbi to create an intentionally provocative Holocaust awareness-themed clothing display (featuring several Nazi flags and a replica of the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign that hung at Auschwitz) to promote his outdoor apparel brand Summit Ice. This brand was conceived after Fielder discovered that Taiga, the manufacturer of a jacket he wore during Nathan for You, had published a tribute to a Holocaust denier in one of their winter catalogs.
The stunt-turned-charity initiative led to celebrities like Jack Black and John Mayer being seen in Summit Ice jackets shortly after the episode aired, with the clothing line raking in over $300,000 in less than two months, all proceeds going to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. In Episode 2 of The Rehearsal, Fielder claims Summit Ice has since raised millions for Holocaust awareness and considers the brand his “proudest achievement.”
Read More: The Rehearsal Season 2 Discusses Much More Than Aviation Safety
Through this narrative setup, he discloses that Paramount+ Germany decided in late 2023 to eliminate the episode in their region due to discomfort with “anything that touches on anti-Semitism in the wake of the Israel/Hamas attacks.”
Fielder adds that this action by Germany sparked concern from other European Paramount branches, ultimately leading to the episode’s removal worldwide as “the ideology of Paramount+ Germany” influenced the entire organization. He notes that, while filming Season 2 of The Rehearsal, there were 50 results for “Nazi,” 10 for “Hitler,” and none for “Judaism” on the Paramount+ app. Although the Nathan for You episode remains unavailable on Paramount+ as of Sunday, interested viewers can find it on Max or purchase it through Prime Video.
To address his predicament with Paramount, Fielder first recruits an actor to portray himself sending the previous emails exchanged with the streamer regarding the matter. “The thing that made this complicated was Paramount is currently airing a different series of mine, a scripted drama that hadn’t yet been renewed,” Fielder explains, referring to The Curse. “How I communicated with them could have career implications, just like it did for co-pilots.”
Later, attempting to engage with Paramount constructively (or so he claims), Fielder constructs a set meant to evoke a Nazi war room and employs an actor dressed as a Nazi to engage with him in German-accented English. Fielder starts by recognizing that while he understands Germany might be “trying to overcompensate” for past events, by censoring the works of Jewish artists, they might be misrepresenting their true values. “Believe it or not, we’re on the same side,” he concludes.
However, after prompting the actor to speak more candidly, the scene concludes with his partner breaking character to explain why he struggles to believe Fielder is genuinely there to understand Paramount’s viewpoint. Instead, Fielder appears to be creating a scenario so skewed that his position seems unquestionable.
“You don’t actually want to hear the Paramount+ perspective or the German perspective,” he critiques. “Look at you pretending to be serious. This isn’t sincere. Just a man with a grudge using his television show to discredit us instead of truly trying to understand us.”
This moment underscores a point Fielder seems to be grappling with regarding individuals’ capability, or lack thereof, to convincingly portray sincerity and, more personally, as TIME TV critic Judy Berman articulates, “whether he, a comedian notorious for humiliating others since Nathan for You, can get anyone to take him seriously on an issue he genuinely cares about.”
Yet, he navigates this delicate terrain to arrive at that insight.