When Nathan Fielder founded Summit Ice in a 2015 episode of Nathan for You, it wasn’t presented as if it would become one of his signature bits. Introduced as a throwaway subplot in the episode “Horseback Riding/Man Zone,” the stunt was conceived after Nathan discovered the maker of his beloved windbreaker had cosigned a Holocaust denier. So he set out to start his own outerwear company that aligned itself with Holocaust education. Sounds harmless, and even philanthropic, right? Until a local outdoor clothing shop agreed to sell Summit Ice apparel, and Fielder designed a replica of Auschwitz-Birkenau on which to display his new soft-shell jackets in store. “Deny Nothing,” went the brand’s slogan.
Now it’s one of his most well-known schemes—but not everyone thought it was funny: Eric Belland, the then-manager of that shop that was once the short-lived home of Summit Ice, said years later he felt like he’d been had. “[Fielder] looks like an idiot within the confines of the show,” Belland told New York magazine in 2022. “But he looks like a nasty trickster outside the confines of what the show is supposed to be.” Fielder cast him as the episode’s “rube,” Belland said.
Looking back, it is clear that Fielder’s tactless display and the vague, confused messaging of Summit Ice are what made the stunt funny and memorable rather than Belland’s involvement. In fact, Belland even comes off as a voice of reason in the episode—he calls the display a “trainwreck” on sight. But one has to imagine that, behind the scenes, there was some degree of convincing (deceiving?) that went into Belland agreeing to let Nathan design that display in the first place, and it’s probably hard to walk away from that experience not feeling like a total mark.
This is merely one example of the many, many times the question of ethics was raised in regards to Nathan for You, even among positive reviews of the series. Some found it “incredibly mean.” Others said it “takes advantage” of its participants or that “it remains uncertain if these jokes are being made at someone’s expense, and if so, whose.” Fielder has maintained that he always intended to be the butt of his own jokes. “It kills me any time I hear people didn’t like their experience. … I definitely feel I’m the most pathetic person in everything I do,” he said in that 2022 New York profile. Even so, while the small business owners on the wrong end of Nathan’s harebrained schemes often came off confused but sympathetic—unless they casually mentioned drinking their grandson’s urine—there was a feeling that Fielder was pushing well-meaning people’s politeness as far as it would go to get them to humor behavior detrimental to their businesses, because, well, he was.
With his current HBO series, The Rehearsal, the subtext of Fielder’s ethically ambiguous comedy became text. Most of the first season dealt with a plot involving a woman, Angela, and her—and eventually Nathan’s—parenthood “rehearsal,” essentially a speed-run childhood with rotating child actors simulating their “son’s” growth over the course of weeks, as Angela and Nathan practiced being a mom and dad. The season ends with Nathan facing a moral conundrum: A 6-year-old child actor growing up without a father in real life becomes attached to Nathan and has trouble understanding that he’s not his real father. After Nathan had to heartbreakingly explain to him that they were just pretending, the ethical misstep became obvious—and Nathan knew he should have done it differently, or perhaps not at all. And unlike in Nathan for You, he was wrestling with that on-screen.
The Rehearsal has been more conducive for Fielder to confront the thorniness of his comedy than Nathan for You was in part because he’s playing a less heightened version of himself than he did on his first series, which in turn allows him to blur the lines of fiction and reality beyond recognition. While Nathan for You’s protagonist remained clueless and inept throughout the series’ run, the Nathan of The Rehearsal gets to progressively learn lessons.
For instance, in Sunday’s Rehearsal episode, “Washington,” Nathan finds out about the real-life support the show has gotten from autistic viewers, many of whom find the show’s concept to be an analogue for masking. He realizes this resonance can be used to partner with an autism advocacy group, which will then legitimize him to a congressman who serves on both the Congressional Autism Caucus and the Subcommittee on Aviation and thus has the power to grant Nathan a hearing to propose rehearsal-like training for pilots to address the aviation communication issue he’s spent the season exploring. When he meets with a doctor from the Center for Autism and Related Disorders, she makes an earnest case for why The Rehearsal has been embraced by the autistic community. “What you’re doing in The Rehearsal is so important for everyone else to know what it’s like to have autism,” she tells him. When Nathan later shows her photos of the replica airport terminal he built for his aviation shenanigans, she remarks that the set would be an excellent tool to prepare autistic kids for a real airport, which can be a particularly overstimulating environment. Another conundrum confronts Nathan—what about the lesson he learned last season? “I made a commitment to myself that we weren’t gonna use any kids in the rehearsals this season,” he says, reflecting on those child actors from his previous parenting experiment.
After some reassurance from the doctor, he decides to welcome the kids into the fake airport, and the result is genuinely heartwarming and clearly positive—a far cry from the tough conversations Nathan had with the 6-year-old actor at the end of Season 1. In making a direct reference to last season’s finale, Nathan shows he’s not only still interrogating the ethics of his comedy but also working out the nuances of when and where they should be applied. That’s carried over into the larger themes of The Rehearsal Season 2, where Nathan is ostensibly researching how poor pilot communication in cockpits has led to plane crashes but more broadly reckoning with how avoidant and antisocial behavior—say, not being totally honest about the intentions of your comedy show to its participants—can cause genuine harm.
That’s not to say The Rehearsal doesn’t also have its rubes, like last season’s Angela or this season’s Jeff, the pilot who got banned from every dating app under the sun. These people were at least partially the butts of Fielder’s jokes, in the same way the small business owners seemed victim to his pranks on Nathan for You, but the difference is that these people weren’t all that sympathetic in the first place. Angela’s possible antisemitism and Jeff’s Tinder antics didn’t exactly invite sympathy (to say nothing of his attempts to set up the exceedingly patient Mara’D with his own dad). With the precedent set by Nathan breaking the fourth wall, the portrayals on The Rehearsal simply feel realistic rather than mean-spirited. How accurate is that feeling? That’s exactly what Fielder is inviting you to ponder.
Fielder’s confrontation of his own ethics in-show doesn’t mean he’s not still receiving real-life criticism for supposedly cruel tactics. Last week, Variety published an interview with a contestant from Wings of Voice, the fake singing competition Nathan staged earlier this season, who felt she’d been tricked into believing the competition was real and spent thousands of dollars on travel for the show. Should her suspicions have been raised when she auditioned for an airline pilot and was given the option to sing only “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” or “Yankee Doodle”? Was she perhaps too desperate for a big break to recognize that a show called Wings of Voice would not provide that? Who’s to say? Fielder has a track record of getting people to agree to ridiculous things, so we can give her the benefit of the doubt there. But the episode itself was far more focused on Nathan’s involvement in the stunt than it was on the contestants. After attempting to act as a judge for Wings of Voice, Nathan finds that he’s actually really bad at it and is largely just pissing off aspiring singers. Do the ends of this revelation justify the means? Again, Fielder leaves that to the audience, but when that moral quandary is being played out on-screen, the result, while cringeworthy, doesn’t have that sting of cruelty—and has even led some to wonder if that Variety article was just part of an elaborate bit.
Summit Ice also recently made an appearance on this season of The Rehearsal, this time in a far more meta context than its original launch on Nathan for You. In Episode 2’s “Star Potential,” Nathan addresses how Paramount+ mysteriously took down the “Horseback Riding/Man Zone” episode of Nathan for You recently and uncovers that the German branch of Paramount flagged the episode for “sensitivities” regarding antisemitism, which led to its removal broadly. He then rehearses a confrontation with German Paramount executives, but “I didn’t know what the Paramount+ Germany offices looked like, so I sort of had to take a guess,” he says in voice-over. Naturally, this means the staged confrontation takes place in a meticulously replicated Nazi war room, complete with faux SS officers sporting Paramount armbands. This was Fielder’s most direct target to date, and a signifier of his evolution from “a man acting like a complete fool,” as he referred to himself in “Washington” over a montage that included clips from Nathan for You, to a character caught between his on-screen and real-life personas—and between his on-screen antics and real-life consequences.
I will say this: Nathan for You is funnier than The Rehearsal, and kind of undeniably so. That shouldn’t come as a surprise—it had a lighter tone and a higher joke rate and wasn’t going for capital-T Themes the way The Rehearsal is (though it was often argued that Nathan for You was actually a sharp satire of late-stage capitalism). But that blurred line between fiction and reality makes The Rehearsal a truly fascinating watch, and completely unpredictable from week to week. Sure, there’s a trade-off for slightly fewer jokes, but The Rehearsal is still damn funny, and it feels worth it to allow that space for Fielder to operate on galaxy-brain levels we haven’t seen since Andy Kaufman. But how worth it? That’s ultimately what we’re watching Fielder seek out.
