Total Blackout: The Tamborine Extended Cut

The bizarre hook of Total Blackout: The Tamborine Extended Cut is the comedy “director’s cut,” a remix where Chris Rock took back the keys to his 2018 Netflix hour, Tamborine, and actively scrubbed away the art-house directing style of Bo Burnham. In its place, Rock delivered a 97-minute version that trades Burnham’s intimate, high-tension close-ups for a looser, messier room-eye view of the stage. The central confessional remains, with Rock taking a sober, self-flagellating look at his own infidelity and porn addiction, but the atmosphere here feels much less like a theatrical reckoning and more like a club gig with the guardrails removed.

Filmed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in late 2017 and released in 2021, this extended version adds nearly forty minutes of material that did not make the original cut. It restores a handful of routines, including a bit comparing exorbitant hotel pricing to modern racism, while pruning other jokes that had aged poorly. Rock even leaves in his own on-stage stumbles, like misspeaking during a setup about nerds and bullies, opting for authenticity over polish.

While the addition of backstage footage with Dave Chappelle and late-night talk show clips can feel self-indulgent, the experiment is a treat for stand-up obsessives. By removing Burnham’s cinematic flourishes, such as the stutter-cut editing on the opening joke about police shootings, Rock reclaims his identity as a pure road comic, even if the final product lacks the sharp focus of the original.