How to prevent button presses from bubbling up when presenting native controller from TVML?

I'd like to present a native view from TVML/JS that has similar capabilities from a UI perspective to the player interface. The requirements are to:

1. Be able to swipe up or press menu to dismiss the tab bar without popping the controller off the navigation stack

2. If the tab bar is not visible pop the controller off the navigation stack when the menu button is pressed.

My first attempt was to use the navigation controller attached to the app controller to present a UITabBarController. Unfortunately pressing the menu button pops the tab bar controller off the stack instead of dimissing the menu bar.

Am I approaching this wrong? Should I be using a custom view controller with a UITabBar instead of a UITabBarController. Please assume that I cannot use the TVML menu bar template as I do need to present some native created controls.

Thanks!