The Curse Series-Premiere Recap: Hall of Mirrors

The Curse is a TV show about trying to make a TV show.

Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone play a bizarro version of Fixer Upper’s Chip and Joanna Gaines — a young couple with dreams of making the sleepy postindustrial Southwest outpost they call home a little less ratchet, one televised reno at a time. Joanna Shiplapped the run-down ranches of Waco, Texas, on HGTV for years before launching her own network. After watching the pilot episode of The Curse, it’s easy to imagine that Whitney Siegel, played by Stone with excruciating levels of self-consciousness, harbors similar aspirations for dominating the bland minimalism of California-cool interiors (white walls, jute rugs, cement floors, etc.).

For Whit and her new hubby, Asher (Fielder), Española, New Mexico, is their personal ground zero. And the community revitalization plan they’re peddling is disturbingly naïve: attract wealthy gentrifiers to town with eco-friendly “passive homes” in the couple’s signature mirrored cladding. Because where first-time buyers in black acetate spectacles go, so pour-over coffee bars, selvedge denim, and economic prosperity for all will surely follow. Their show is called Flipanthropy, because for every house they sell, the Siegels will use the profits — which Asher later concedes do not exist — to subsidize the rent of Española locals being priced out of Dodge. (In this regard, Flipanthropy reminds me of Netflix’s organizing show The Home Edit, which sees famous customers pay for completely unnecessary transformations, like Khloé Kardashian having her ginormous garage rejiggered to fit her daughter’s collection of motorized toy cars. Then, in the second act, a regular person’s life is given a comparatively depressing tweak, like a mother of two who wins back enough floor space to roll out her yoga mat.)

Unlike Fixer Upper, The Curse is no two-hander. Benny Safdie — who wrote the series with Fielder — plays Dougie, an oily, pot-stirring reality-TV producer trying to save the couple’s tedious infomercial of a show from premature cancellation. (The character has ample shades of Shiri Appleby’s ruthless puppet master Rachel Goldberg from UnREAL, Lifetime’s standout satire of The Bachelor franchise.) “People are really going to be dreaming about being with you,” Dougie whispers in Whitney’s ear. In reality, if the show ever makes it to air, audiences will be making fun of her. Take a shot every time she invokes the trickle-down economy or calls something indigenous — even casinos — “sacred” or wears overalls. It’s white-savior bingo.

Hunting for some compelling B-roll, Dougie tells “Ashman” — they’re old “friends” from sleepaway camp, but I’d guess they weren’t equals back then (or now, to Dougie’s mind) — to give money to a little girl selling Sprites in the Family Dollar parking lot. Asher only has a hundred-dollar bill on him, which he snatches back from the girl when he thinks the camera crew has stopped rolling. “I curse you,” she tells him. She looks pretty serious about it.

By this point in the episode, Asher has already been established as a man with a pronounced lack of empathy and a habit of making trouble for himself. He’s a bad sound-bite machine; he lacks Chip Gaines’s aw-shucks manners. The reason the film crew is loitering in the strip-mall parking lot in the first place is because the Siegels are frantically trying to undo Asher’s last screwup. While taping an interview for local TV, Asher snapped — literally snapped — in the face of a reporter who dared ask Whitney about championing the impoverished community of Española when her dad is a notorious Santa Fe slumlord. In exchange for burying that brand-damaging interview, Asher has promised the reporter, Monica, some half-baked inside scoop on bad practices at the reservation casino where he used to work. Monica, for her part, does not completely shoot him down.

It’s hard to say which of the series’s burgeoning subplots have legs. Is Monica, the roving reporter with anchor-desk aspirations, going to stick around to take down the gaming board, or will she simply run the damning tape of the eco-flippers? (Asher is right when he tells her a story about the Siegels is small-time compared to tribal intrigue, but his face is so punchable.)

Will it ever matter that Whitney’s morally corrupt dad, Paul, bankrolled the couple’s early property investments?

And what to make of Paul’s attempt to bond with his son-in-law over the fact that both men are extremely modestly endowed, so small of penis, in fact, that he christens them the “cherry tomato brothers”? (A food I will never experience the same.)

After Shabbat with her parents — Whitney is a zealous convert to Judaism — Asher fucks his wife with a vibrator named Steven while he jerks off on the floor by her feet. Is it cool that they’ve found a sex life that works for them, or am I right to feel a little bummed that Ashman doesn’t even want to join in by the end? And did the show mean for me to immediately wonder what Dougie’s dick must be like, or am I just deranged?

If there’s a central conflict so far, it’s between Whitney’s earnest vision for Flipanthropy — a picture-perfect snapshot of the newlyweds reinventing Española in their sustainable image while simultaneously respecting its roots — and Dougie’s, in which the couple has spats, confronts “the G-word,” and doesn’t gloss over Asher’s habitual faux pas. Imagine for a second that Fixer Upper was directed by a guy who really wanted to make music videos. When a terminally ill cancer patient doesn’t cry with joy on-camera — sure, the Siegels got her son a barista job, but she is still dying — Dougie blows menthol in her eyes. Whitney’s dismayed at the “TV magic,” but TV directors should be taking notes.

It’s even unclear how large the curse itself will loom over the Siegels’ fate. One evening, while the crew reviews dailies, Whitney notices the footage of Asher handing over and then retracting the hundo. She sends him out to find the little girl, restore the money, and reset their karma. Asher does some of this. Like a dutiful husband, he does attempt to find the girl in the middle of the night, but when he fails, he gives a different unhoused person the cash. Close enough, I guess. But when he gets home to his wife, he tells her he found the girl and that the reunion ended in hugs and the girl’s explicit removal of the curse. If the curse isn’t real, who cares? But if it is, lying about it will surely increase its power.

I was watching “Land of Enchantment” on my laptop when my husband walked into the room. “Is it funny?” he asked. Hilarious, I said, before adding: But you’re not going to laugh. The Curse is the kind of show that compels your mouth into the shape required for laughter, but then no sound comes out. At one point, a woman walks into a clothing shop with a neon name sign hanging behind a cork cash wrap and, like, ten pairs of jeans laid out on a long table. At the coffee shop next door, everything you could imagine costing extra costs extra. The Curse nails what it looks and feels like to live in the world right this second without really doing anything to skewer it. It just represents it so perfectly that you have to (inaudibly) laugh from embarrassment. In a way, it’s better than funny; it reveals the joke. It sets the world as you know it to a pulsing score from Oneohtrix Point Never, and suddenly a guy standing in a parking lot waiting to talk to someone feels like one of the most fucked-up things you’ve ever seen on TV.

Perhaps the series’s best joke so far are the houses themselves. Clad entirely in mirrors — which Flipanthrophy’s green-building talking head ensures viewers is an unnecessary aesthetic choice — Whitney’s creations “reflect” the local community: the green, leafy trees; the hard-packed sand of the desert; the hollowed-out cars on cinder blocks. But that’s only when you’re standing far away from her so-called “invisible houses.”

The closer you get to them, the more impossible it is to see anything besides your own image staring you down, getting bigger as you approach it. It’s a fitting design choice for a woman who is obsessed with how audiences will perceive her and her husband. Whitney would tell you her main concern is to highlight the Española community and eco-friendly living — what she calls her “holistic home philosophy on steroids.” But that’s not really how showbiz works; it’s not a public service.

At the center of every new TV show is a person who really, really wanted to get on TV.