Breaking Down the Nathan for You Controversy at the Center of The Rehearsal Season 2 Episode 2

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Episode 2 of The Rehearsal Season 2.

In just its second episode, Season 2 of Nathan Fielder’s hit HBO series The Rehearsal is already testing the limits of boundary pushing it can get away with. Of course, we’d expect nothing less from the creator behind such ingeniously deranged projects as The Curse and Nathan for You.

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In fact, one episode of Nathan for You—the mid-2010s Comedy Central docu-reality series that revolved around Fielder trying to help struggling small businesses by coming up with outrageous marketing stunts—plays a pivotal role in the latest installment of The Rehearsal. Following a premiere that introduced the season’s timely central focus, aviation safety, Episode 2 takes the narrative in unexpected new directions (as is Fielder’s typical M.O.). One such deviation involves exploring how an episode of Nathan of You being removed from the show’s streaming home of Paramount+ relates to The Rehearsal‘s purported aim of empowering people to navigate tricky real-life situations.

In the Season 2 premiere, Fielder introduced his theory that many plane crashes are caused by co-pilots facing difficulty speaking up to their captains when they think something is amiss. In Episode 2, Fielder sets the scene by comparing these issues to his own inability to successfully confront Paramount about taking down Season 3, Episode 2 of Nathan for You from its platform due to “sensitivities.” In the 2015 episode, titled “Horseback Riding/Man Zone,” Fielder, who is Jewish, partnered with a rabbi to create an intentionally over-the-top Holocaust awareness-themed clothing display (one featuring several Nazi flags and a recreation of the infamous “Arbeit Macht Frei” sign that hung above the main entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp) to promote his outdoor apparel brand Summit Ice. The idea for Summit Ice was born from Fielder learning that Taiga, the maker of a jacket he had worn while filming Nathan for You, had published a tribute to a Holocaust denier in one of their winter catalogs.

The stunt-turned-charitable initiative resulted in celebrities ranging from Jack Black to John Mayer being spotted in Summit Ice jackets in the weeks after the episode aired and the clothing line generating more than $300,000 in sales in just under two months, with all profits donated to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre. In Episode 2 of The Rehearsal, Fielder shares Summit Ice has since raised millions of dollars for Holocaust awareness and that he views the brand as his “proudest achievement.”

Read More: The Rehearsal Season 2 Is About So Much More Than Aviation Safety

Through this setup, he reveals he was informed that a decision had been made by Paramount+ Germany in late 2023 to remove the episode in their region after they become uncomfortable with “anything that touches on anti-Semitism in the aftermath of the Israel/Hamas attacks.”

Fielder goes on to say that this act by Germany triggered the attention of other European Paramount branches and eventually led to the episode being taken down everywhere as “the ideology of Paramount+ Germany” spread to the entire globe. He also points out that, at the time of filming Season 2 of The Rehearsal, there were 50 results for “Nazi,” 10 for “Hitler,” and zero for “Judaism” on the Paramount+ app. Although the Nathan for You episode is, as of Sunday, still not available on Paramount+, interested viewers can stream it on Max or purchase it to watch on Prime Video.

In an attempt to work through his issue with Paramount, Fielder first brings in an actor to play the role of himself sending the emails he’d previously exchanged with the streamer on the topic. “The thing that made this tricky was Paramount is currently airing a different series of mine, a scripted drama that hadn’t yet been renewed,” Fielder explains in reference to The Curse. “How I spoke to them could have career repercussions, just like it did for co-pilots.”

Later, to try to figure out how to engage with Paramount in a constructive way (or so he says), Fielder builds a set clearly intended to evoke a Nazi war room and hires an actor dressed as a Nazi to spar with him in German-accented English. Fielder starts out by acknowledging that while he recognizes Germany is probably “trying to overcompensate” for what happened in the past, by censoring the work of Jewish artists, they could be giving people the wrong idea about what they actually stand for. “Believe it or not, we’re on the same side,” he concludes.

However, after encouraging the actor to speak more freely, the bit ends with his scene partner breaking character to explain why he has a hard time believing Fielder is there, as he claims, to understand Paramount’s point of view. Instead, Fielder is simply constructing a scenario skewed to the point that he would obviously be in the right.

“You don’t actually want to get the Paramount+ perspective or the German perspective,” he says. “Look at you pretending to be serious. This is not sincere. Just a man with a grudge using his television show to smear us instead of trying to understand us.”

It’s a moment that gets right to the heart of a point Fielder seems like he’s trying to make about people’s ability, or lack thereof, to convincingly portray sincerity and, more personally, as TIME TV critic Judy Berman put it, “whether he, a comedian with a reputation for humiliating people that dates back to Nathan for You, can get anyone to take him seriously on an issue he really cares about.”

But he certainly walks a tightrope to make it to that revelation.