The Rehearsal Recap: Rejection

The ingenious trick of The Rehearsal so far this season is that its comic premise — spending generous HBO resources to explore and improve the relationship between co-pilots and captains on commercial airline flights — isn’t nearly as narrow as it sounds. While Nathan Fielder can still pay off his absurdly meticulous re-creation of a Houston airport terminal and the dozens of mimicked airline crew members and Panda Express workers inside it, the captain/co-pilot dynamic is proving to be an endlessly elastic metaphor. After all, there are power dynamics that affect nearly every relationship, and people are often in a position — at work, in dating and marriage, across the counter, etc. — where they feel like the co-pilot, trying to assert themselves in a situation where they don’t have much leverage or comfort. That can take a show like The Rehearsal anywhere and this brilliant episode expands in two wildly different directions that are not, at a closer glance, much different at all.

“Star Potential” proves to be a special treat for fans of Fielder’s Comedy Central series Nathan For You, not just for the return of his Holocaust-awareness-themed outdoor apparel line Summit Ice (more on that later), but for his expertise in the reality-TV artifice. Consider “The Hunk,” his spot-on parody of dating shows like The Bachelor, in which Fielder tries to get over his awkwardness with women by putting himself at the center of a fake reality competition show. Or “The Claw of Shame,” an elaborate stunt in which he has to make a Houdini-like escape from handcuffs before a robotic claw pulls down his pants in front of a group of children. (If he fails, police are on hand to arrest him for indecent exposure.) Fielder showed an exacting sense of how grotesquely unreal reality shows could get, as well as a deep awareness of how the sausage gets made. That’s one of the overall benefits of any Fielder enterprise: He’s like the Penn and Teller of television. He makes magic while letting us see the strings.

All of this knowledge comes from personal experience. At 23, he tells us, Fielder was a junior producer for Canadian Idol, which for him mostly involved culling a massive field of contenders down to the small handful that would compete for the prize. That meant sitting in a tiny room without cameras all day, in multiple Canadian cities, destroying people’s dreams. What does this have to do with airline co-pilots? “When you know that whatever you say is going to devastate the person across from you,” narrates Fielder, “it makes you not want to say anything at all. I was becoming convinced that this was the reason some co-pilots have trouble saying no to their captain. They just can’t imagine a way for the interaction to go well.” Speaking up without negative repercussions is a delicate task under any circumstances, and it’s usually easier not to say anything at all.

And so, Fielder devises a flight-themed singing competition called “Wings of Voice,” and it’s not quite a fake competition, either, based on how hilariously upfront he is about the prize. “It’s not a singing TV show,” he tells a young contestant. “It’s actually a singing competition as part of another TV show that has nothing to do with singing.” The real focus is again on his co-pilots, who each occupy one of those tiny rooms like Fielder once did on Canadian Idol, and have to listen to hopefuls sing a cappella from a list of public domain songs like “Down in New Orleans” and “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Their job was his job: Hand out gold tickets to those vanishingly few with star potential and let down everybody else.

The real study here is to see how (or if) a rejected person can leave the room feeling good, which brings the focus back to the co-pilots and away from the “winners,” who take their gold ticket to “the next round” of continued obscurity. After using a rating system where contestants judge their judges on a scale of 1-10, Fielder zeroes in on the co-pilot with the highest average, a Southwest employee who gets a score of over nine. What makes her “nos” so tolerable? Is it her use of positive words “fantastic” or something deeper and less quantifiable, an “aura” that she possesses that other people, like the famously awkward and mirthless character of Nathan Fielder, do not?

Fielder could have settled with those questions, which are big enough on their own, but in one of this episode’s smartest shifts, he sticks the Southwest co-pilot into the fake cockpit with a captain so recklessly inappropriate with women that he’s been kicked off five different dating apps. In this situation, the idea of making a more powerful person feel “good” in a professional setting takes on a more sinister air, because the co-pilot isn’t in a position to let the captain down like the singers on “Wings of Voice.” She’s stuck in the defensive posture of accommodating or deflecting a battery of personal questions until she can finally figure out a way to shut them down politely. That’s a tough spot, and being able to soften the blow with words like “fantastic” is not going to get the job done.

All this leads, as elegantly and fluidly as a chain of thought, to Fielder revisiting a conflict with Paramount+ over the Summit Ice episode of Nathan For You, which remains conspicuously absent from the service. Casting a lookalike of himself that he can observe with a pensive expression, Fielder traces the steps he took to figure out what happened to the episode and try to get it restored to the platform. He remembers being angry, but his emails to his Paramount+ contacts are cordial, with his complaint couched by phrases like “forever grateful” and friendly exclamation marks. Since Showtime, a Paramount+-connected network, had bankrolled The Curse and hadn’t yet decided to renew it for a second season, there was reason not to torch that particular bridge. He was informed that the German office of Paramount+ had pulled the episode due to “sensitivities” related to antisemitism, and the rest of the world had followed suit. (A graphic showing Paramount+’s reach expanding from Germany through Europe and behind is astounding: “Before long, the ideology of Paramount+ Germany had spread to the entire globe, eliminating all Jewish content that made them uncomfortable.”)

The timing for Fielder to renew his beef with Paramount+ — and to now detonate that bridge as if it were on the River Kwai — could not be better, given how the current government and various elite colleges are making decisions for Jews about what constitutes antisemitism. But the breathtaking audacity of imagining Paramount+’s German office as a Nazi war room raises the beef to A5 Japanese Wagyu levels, right along with casting an actor who speaks like a nefarious officer in a WWII movie. (“Hospitality iz vut separates us from ze animals, don’t you agree?”) Fielder gives himself space on a big HBO show to blast Paramount+ for its decision (“You have to let us Jews express ourselves because honestly the way you’re approaching this whole thing, people might get the wrong idea about what you stand for”), but he also acknowledges, in a crafty shift in stage direction, that he’s being insincere in trying to understand why the episode was pulled.

It all circles back in the end to Fielder savaging his own vanity and poking at his absence of charisma. “Some people are born great performers,” he concludes. “They have the talent to effortlessly convince others they’re more than just a number. But for the rest of us, no matter how sincere we are inside, it will always be a struggle.” His struggle to do better, to summon the honey-lacquered words that might leave a rejected 15-year-old feeling okay about not moving forward on “Wings of Voice,” is enough to earn him a six out of 10. Or a nine, should he choose to delude himself.

Scene Work

• “I had really done it. I had brought Canadian Idol back to life.”

• Absolutely wonderful to see the return of Nate’s Lizard Lounge to The Rehearsal set. What power for Nathan Fielder to not have to go to a bar, but to have a bar come to him.

• “What’s your name?” “My name’s Danny.” “Danny? That’s beautiful.”

• Fielder at the gym, as his actor re-creates the moment when he found out why the Summit Ice episode was pulled: “What I discovered was so shocking a tornado of emotions began spinning inside my body.”

• Wonderful comic beat for Fielder to take in the critique from his German Paramount+ executive about his cartoonish office set-up by staring somberly out the window as Nazis march on the lawn below with Paramount+ armbands on their uniforms.

• “Some people are born great performers. They have the talent to effortlessly convince others they’re more than just a number. But for the rest of us, no matter how sincere we are inside, it will always be a struggle.”