Lawmaker From ‘The Rehearsal’ Refutes Suggestion That He Didn’t Listen to Nathan Fielder
Season Two of The Rehearsal may be done, but the discourse is far from over.
Since the finale aired on Sunday night, the winner of Nathan Fielder’s fake singing competition has busy poring over flight data in an effort to figure out whether or not Fielder actually flew a plane full of engers from the San Bernardino airport last February.
Now actual U.S. lawmakers are weighing on the show.
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In the penultimate episode of The Rehearsal, Fielder speaks before a recreation of the congressional aviation subcommittee, and later meets with one of its actual senior , Congressman Steve Cohen of Tennessee. Fielder is seemingly only able to access Cohen by pretending to hold a meeting on autism awareness, then suddenly pivoting to his presentation about cockpit etiquette. In Fielder’s pitch, airline captains and co-pilots would be assigned characters before each flight (Captain Allears and First Officer Blunt) in order to improve communication and reduce tension.
During a recent appearance on Jimmy Kimmel Live!, in which he showed up in a pilot’s uniform and dunked on Captain Sully Sullenberger, Fielder told the host, “We struggled to get people to pay attention to this. I tried to get lawmakers to be like, ‘Look this is an issue.’ They don’t take it seriously, or don’t think it’s a big enough issue.”
But in an interview published shortly before that interview aired, Congressman Cohen basically contradicted that statement. Cohen told The Commercial Appeal that several of his staffers were already aware of Fielder, and had even seen the first season of The Rehearsal. “They were cautious about it, knowing that sometimes he tries to do things that are a little off the wall or tries to make you look awkward or something,” Cohen explained. “But my chief of staff talked to the people at (HBO’s parent company Warner Bros. Discovery), and we decided to go ahead and do it.”
According to Cohen, he and Fielder “had a nice discussion about different things and got along and posed for pictures afterwards,” although he did say that Fielder had “a tendency to just to just kind of sit and say nothing at times. How much of that was shtick and how much of it was real I never really knew — and I still don’t know.”
While the episode made it seem as though Cohen rebuffed Fielder’s request to speak before the real-life subcommittee, he told the newspaper that Fielder had already been informed that this wasn’t within his power. “I told him, ‘I’m in the minority,” Cohen recalled. “‘I’m the ranking member on the aviation subcommittee. But the chairman is the one that determines the witnesses’ — so I couldn’t make him a witness or anything like that anyway.”
As for the apparent hasty end to their meeting, Cohen alleges that, in real life, they spoke for around 40 minutes. “Maybe people thought I acted abruptly at the end," Cohen said. "But we’d had a long meeting, and I got up and said, ‘It’s been nice talking with you’ because I had another appointment I was late for. But he’s an awkward guy. Or he acted like he was awkward.”
Of course, “politician” may be the only profession that’s more untrustworthy than “host of HBO’s The Rehearsal.” So it’s hard to know who to believe.
