Paramount Wears It

It’s been a rough 48 hours for the Paramount media corporation, which deserves all the blowback it’s currently getting. First, on this week’s episode of ’60 Minutes,’ which is currently more relevant than it’s been in 20 years, correspondent Scott Pelley ended the show with a savage denunciation of Paramount, which owns CBS, the news show’s home network. The show’s executive producer Bill Owens had made a big to-do about resigning in the preceding week, saying that Paramount was overly trying to interfere in 60 Minutes’s content because it’s trying to get the Trump Administration to sign off on a merger. Pelley condemned that. “Bill felt he’d lost the independence that honest journalism requires,” he said.

Missing from that whole conversation was what Paramount’s interference actually amounted to. But given the current political climate, you can assume that someone from the Trump Administration had been complaining to the company. There was a mini-controversy during the campaign about the show’s “selective editing” of a Kamala Harris campaign interview, which made her look smarter on the issues than she actually was. 60 Minutes, like most of the mainstream media, has shown an affiliation toward Democrats and away from MAGA ever since Trump emerged. That’s not exactly a secret. One can imagine heat coming down on Paramount to level the playing field, and one can also imagine a veteran journalist quitting because of those demands.

Paramount could easily have weathered a petty media/politics turf war. No one in the 60 Minutes scenario is a totally sincere actor, not the producer, not the correspondents, not the government, and not the company. The whole thing felt hacky and dirty. Nathan Fielder, however, is an actual artist, and he absolutely hit Paramount right where it lives this week.

On the second season of Fielder’s show ‘The Rehearsal’ (an HBO joint, not a Paramount product), Fielder is somewhat sincerely and somewhat sarcastically trying to suss out whether or not bad cockpit communication dynamics are leading to the current rise in airplane disasters. It’s an odd topic for a comedy show, but Fielder is about as odd as a comedian gets. Using HBO’s money, he’s built an accurate replica of a Houston airport terminal. In episode 2, among other things, he staged a fake singing competition based on his time as a junior producer on ‘Canadian Idol.’

What does this all have to do with Paramount?

Well, at some point in episode 2, Fielder reveals that Paramount Germany removed an old episode of his show ‘Nathan For You,’ which satirizes Holocaust denial, because it’s sensitive to anything that would “promote antisemitism.” This is quite ironic, since that episode is one of the funniest and most savage denunciations of antisemitism put to screen in the last decade. Paramount Germany’s decision triggered a full corporate removal of the episode from Paramount+ apps around the world, which Fielder savagely depicts in an animated map meant to resemble the Nazi blitzkrieg. Fielder then stages a fake confrontation with a Paramount Germany executive, played by an actor, made up to resemble and sound like an actual Nazi.

This was a shocking and hilarious twist for a series that previously hadn’t mentioned Paramount at all. And Fielder obviously filmed and staged this stuff long before the ’60 Minutes’ controversy. He’s not implying that Paramount is actually run by Nazis, but that it’s run by dunderheads who are terrible at reading the political tea leaves. And that actually goes a long way to explain what’s going on at 60 Minutes. By trying to please everyone, Paramount is ending up pleasing no one at all, except for people who love to dunk on Paramount. Which, as it turns out, is everyone after all.