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Leave it to Nathan Fielder to take a joke all the way in which. On the second episode of season two of The Rehearsal, Fielder took purpose at Paramount+, depicting the streamer as Nazis after it eliminated an episode of his earlier present, Nathan For You, for “sensitivities” surrounding antisemitism.
The second season of Fielder’s HBO actuality comedy collection, The Rehearsal, finds the comic hyperfixating on ways in which he might help industrial airplanes keep away from airplane crashes by any means mandatory. (Spoilers forward.) But the HBO collection takes a detour in episode two, when Fielder discovers that Paramount+ had eliminated an episode of Nathan For You—the mid-2010s Comedy Central docu-reality collection the place the comic would concoct elaborate schemes with a purpose to assist a person with a enterprise drawback they have been dealing with—because of specious allegations of antisemitism.
In the 2015 episode of Nathan For You “Horseback Riding/Man Zone,” Fielder begins an attire line referred to as Summit Ice after discovering that Taiga, the Canadian model that made his favourite winter jacket, had revealed a tribute to the Holocaust denier Doug Collins. In response, Fielder, who’s Jewish, launched his personal model of winter jackets, Summit Ice, devoted to spreading Holocaust consciousness and donating all earnings to the Vancouver Holocaust Education Centre and different academic organizations. Fielder enlisted the assistance of a rabbi and pitched the enterprise thought to a retailer proprietor on the present, which included showcasing their clothes behind a reproduction of the Auschwitz gate, swastika pennants, and a faux skeleton in an oven.
While Fielder’s Holocaust-centric winter jacket pitch flopped within the room—“Find something else to do with your life, because you are not good at this,” the shop proprietor mentioned—the model turned one thing of a cult hit for followers of the eccentric comic. Summit Ice reportedly generated $300,000 in gross sales in its first eight weeks, with well-known people like John Mayer and Jack Black noticed sporting Summit Ice jackets within the weeks after the episode aired. In episode two of The Rehearsal, Fielder estimates that, up to now decade, Summit Ice has in all probability generated hundreds of thousands of {dollars} towards Holocaust consciousness. Summit Ice is Fielder’s “proudest achievement,” he mentioned, utilizing it for instance of one thing “silly” that “can actually have an impact in the world.”
While Fielder’s Summit Ice intentions have been pure, the message of his Nathan For You stunt was apparently misinterpreted by Paramount, the guardian firm of Comedy Central, and its streamer Paramount+ eliminated the episode with out informing Fielder. After reaching out to Paramount+, Fielder discovered the reasoning for taking the episode down, which he described on The Rehearsal as “so shocking” that it created “a tornado of emotions began spinning in my body.”
“In late 2023, a decision was made by Paramount+ Germany to remove the episode in their region after they became uncomfortable with what they called ‘anything that touches on antisemitism in the aftermath of the Israel/Hamas attacks,’” mentioned Fielder, studying an electronic mail he obtained from Paramount+ on The Rehearsal. “This act by Germany triggered the attention of other European Paramount branches, and they, in turn, pulled the episode too. Before long, the ideology of Paramount+ Germany had spread to the entire globe, eliminating all Jewish content that made them uncomfortable.” As Fielder is describing this, the display screen shows a map of Europe with the Paramount+ brand spreading from Germany throughout all of Europe in a ripple impact—directly, a not-so-subtle parallel to the unfold of fascism.
Ever attune to irony, Fielder proceeded to dedicate the final half of the episode to “rehearsing” the dialog he would have with Paramount executives about why they took “Horseback Riding/Man Zone” off the platform. But there was one drawback. “I didn’t know what the Paramount+ Germany offices looked like, so I sort of had to take a guess,” mentioned Fielder. His model of the German Paramount places of work was straight out of Nazi Germany, with employed actors portraying Paramount “executives” with thick German accents, wearing Nazi-adjacent fits, saluting one another, and taking army orders. Large banners with the Paramount+ brand draped the partitions.