Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder’s New Show Is Excruciating

Over the past few years, TV providers have been steadily moving away from the binge drop, returning to releasing episodes at a weekly pace. The slow drip of the classical model allows interest to build over time and allows viewers to talk their way through the story at a shared pace, alleviating the discursive foreplay of determining just how far the person you’re talking to has watched. But while The Curse, the new Showtime series starring Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder, is likely to generate plenty of discussion in the 10 weeks between its premiere and its finale, the staggered release is important for another reason: An hour at a time is about all you can stand.

Provoking discomfort isn’t new territory for The Curse’s creators, Fielder and Benny Safdie, who co-wrote and directed most of its episodes. But I’m not sure they’ve ever been quite this intent on making people squirm. Unease isn’t just a byproduct of the series, in which Fielder and Stone play newlyweds trying to launch a reality show about building eco-friendly housing in the American Southwest; it’s practically its raison d’être. There’s hardly a moment that doesn’t make your skin crawl, and in later episodes, I found myself lunging for the pause button in a way I usually reserve for horror movies watched alone after dark.

At first, Asher (Fielder) and Whitney (Stone) come across as brittle caricatures, inflatable dummies designed to be knocked down over and over again. Their pitch to the residents of Española, New Mexico, a small, downmarket city outside Los Alamos, is as unconvincing as the name of their would-be HGTV series, Fliplanthropy. The idea is to revitalize the area by building a series of “passive houses,” energy-efficient dwellings that regulate their own temperature with minimal need for heating or cooling. The trouble is that Whitney’s designs aren’t made to be lived in. The houses’ internal ecosystems are so delicate that you can’t so much as crack a window, and merely opening the front door takes an hour to recover from. Whitney cheerfully compares them to thermoses, to which one prospective buyer responds: “Who wants to live in a thermos?”

The urban hipsters who would be Whitney and Asher’s ideal buyers don’t exactly flock to grungy Española, but the simple act of building the houses has already affected the local economy, displacing current residents without drawing new ones. “We really believe that gentrification doesn’t have to be a game of winners and losers,” Asher tells a skeptical local TV reporter. “While affordability may be decreasing, opportunities are rising.” Those opportunities, though, are only for show—more specifically, for their show. The strip-mall coffee shop that provides a full-time job for a Latino ex-con displaced by one of their developments—part of a product-placement deal with an international conglomerate—only stays open while the cameras are rolling, and their pledge to employ only local residents clashes with the coffee chain’s desire to fill the vacancies with camera-friendly ringers.

While Whitney and Asher try to play nice for the camera, the person on the other side of the lens wants just the opposite. A journeyman reality TV producer who the couple have tapped to shoot their pilot, Dougie (Benny Safdie) is a self-styled dirtbag who wears his crassness as a badge of honor. In The Curse’s first scene, he dabs water in the eyes of an elderly woman with cancer because she doesn’t look sufficiently bereft, and he rolls his eyes at footage of an expert explaining how a passive house works: “This guy just spent four minutes talking about air.” Whitney and Asher strive to present themselves as an aspirational couple, ambassadors for their personal brand, but Dougie is constantly trying to sow discord between them, or at least get shots he can use to construct the appearance of it later. Exasperated by the unwatchably bland show they want him to make, Dougie shows them a tape of his proudest creation: a series in which women compete to marry a masked man, holding back until after the wedding ceremony the big reveal that his face has been horribly burned. It’s only when the horrified Whitney and Asher push back that Dougie is forced to admit his prized pilot was rejected by the network.

Unlike their hermetically sealed houses, the couple’s façade shows cracks from the start. Her outward benevolence is stretched over a yawning need to be liked, especially by the people she thinks she’s helping. It’s most keenly felt in her ongoing courtship of Cara (Nizhonniya Austin), a Pueblo artist whose work has been carefully placed in the passive houses as proof of their connection to “the community.” Cara sees Whitney for what she is—a white liberal hoping to cloak herself in Indigenous bona fides—but she’s also mindful of what appearing on a nationally televised show could do for a struggling artist. So she keeps her patron and wannabe friend at a carefully calculated distance, experimenting with just how much leeway Whitney’s guilt buys her. (As it turns out, a lot.)

Asher is as affectless as Whitney is nervy, like a robot that hasn’t settled on which human emotions it wants to mimic. On his shows Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, Fielder’s characters were thwarted in their desire to help others by their inability to grasp how others wanted to be helped, but his cockamamie business proposals and baroque simulations seemed to stem, at least at the in-universe level, from a genuine good-heartedness. (The real Fielder’s motives, as always, remain tantalizingly murky.) Asher certainly wants to be seen as good. But does he actually want to be good? Upset by the TV reporter’s pointed questions about Whitney’s relationship to her slumlord parents, Asher, at Dougie’s suggestion, approaches a young girl selling loose sodas in a parking lot and gives her a $100 bill. For a moment, he basks in her excited gratitude, walking away with a stiff-lipped smile on his face. But as soon as Dougie’s got his shot, Asher backtracks and reneges on his charity. He’d love to give the girl a $20, he explains, if she’d only give him back the $100 long enough for him to run into a store and get change. But she unsurprisingly balks at the exchange, and when he finally coerces her into returning the money, she has one thing to say to him: “I curse you.”

Our understanding of what that means changes many times over the length of The Curse, and even after watching all 10 episodes (a few of them twice), I can’t say for certain. The series isn’t invested in the supernatural, but it’s infused with a deep sense of weirdness, driven home by John Medeski and Daniel Lopatin’s piercing synthesizer score. If there’s power in the girl’s curse, it’s in Asher’s fear of it, and the guilt mixed in with that fear. (Would he even entertain the idea that this child had magic powers if she were white instead of Black?) Is it the thought of being cursed that eats away at him, or just the idea that there’s a person somewhere in Española who doesn’t think of him as a benevolent savior?

Not even Asher, whose emotions are as much a mystery to him as they are to us, seems to know whether his and Whitney’s high-minded ideals are for real. They have their ulterior motives, sure—namely, hoping the passive houses will drive up the value of other properties they’ve bought around Española—but there are moments when they suddenly act against their immediate interests in ways that show a vestigial sense of morality. The trick is in telling the difference.

The Curse’s characters are constantly being watched: by Dougie’s camera, by news crews and nosy neighbors, and by the show itself, which frequently adopts the perspective of surveillance footage, peering down at odd angles or looking through blurry obstructions. Even the passive houses themselves, coated entirely in reflective materials, send back a warped reflection of their surroundings. (The houses are reflections, too: When photos are posted to an architecture Instagram, commenters quickly point out that Whitney swiped the concept from artist Doug Aitken.) Surrounded by people playing ideas of themselves, whether for professional cameras or the ones in their phones, Whitney and Asher and Dougie don’t have a prayer of seeing themselves for who they really are.

The Curse’s characters are painful to watch because they’re self-conscious without being self-aware. Their curse isn’t the result of a young girl’s words; it’s their driving need to perform for an audience they can’t begin to understand. At the end of the first episode, the camera holds on a disconsolate Asher, and then he’s staring back, right into the lens. The frame suddenly tilts down to the floor, and it’s as if we’ve been caught peeping, looking shamefully at our feet because we can’t look him in the eye. Maybe he’s guilty, but we are too.