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The Rehearsal Recap: Rejection
Nathan finds the connection between contestants in a fake singing competition, a censored comedy show, and a pilot banned from five dating apps.
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. (“Hospitality izvut 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.
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