Nathan Fielder is a bard of discomfort. In his absurdist Comedy Central docuseries Nathan For You, the Canadian comedian offered his services as a small business consultant to unsuspecting real people, whom he persuaded, with a straight face, to do things such as sell excrement-flavored frozen yogurt, create a “sleeper cell” of bad drivers to undermine Uber, and reimagine a local bar as a smoking-themed community theater to exploit a loophole in California’s laws against indoor smoking. If the metafictional screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation, Being John Malkovich) was asked to reboot The Office as a reality TV series, with roles filled by actual residents of Scranton, the result might look something like Fielder’s work.
In his even more absurd, at times surreal, follow-up series, HBO’s The Rehearsal, Fielder presented himself as the impresario of an audacious experiment: What if we could free ourselves of risk, uncertainty, and regret, he proposed, by meticulously rehearsing and war-gaming life itself? With the help of hired actors, background extras, a robotic baby, and, at one point, an exact life-sized replica of a real bar in Brooklyn, Fielder pursued that premise to its bizarre, Truman Show-style conclusion. As with Nathan For You, part of The Rehearsal’s squirm-inducing comedy came from the fact that not everyone on screen was in on the joke.
THE SUBTLETY OF A MURDER AT THE END OF THE WORLD
Fielder himself never broke character, nor gave definitive answers to the questions these shows raised. Were they best understood as reality television, documentary, mockumentary, or some fourth thing? Where did fact end and fiction start? He wasn’t telling, which only contributed to viewers’ sense of having entered some uncharted and uncanny valley.
Perhaps he has been sucked into a game of one-upmanship against himself. His latest series, Showtime’s The Curse, is as strange and vexing as his earlier work, even as it seems, on the surface, more conventional. Unlike Nathan For You and The Rehearsal, The Curse is a scripted satire, with no claims to being “real” — though the show’s fly-on-the-wall-style cinematography and liberal use of unknown or seemingly first-time actors give it a seductively documentary feel.
Fielder and Emma Stone (La La Land, Poor Things) play Asher and Whitney Siegel, a recently married yuppie couple who are developing an HGTV series they hope to co-host. The series, Fliplanthropy, follows their efforts to revitalize Española, New Mexico, where they buy run-down properties and replace them with energy-efficient eco-homes. Asher and Whitney are ambitious, tightly wound do-gooders at risk of collapsing under the weight of their contradictions. They want to improve the area’s economic prospects but not gentrify people out; respect the local culture but also make it more progressive; promote work by Native American artists but not in a way that could open them to charges of commodifying or tokenizing it; and so on. Their show is filled with ham-fisted lines such as, “But succulents aren’t the only thing indigenous to this land.”
HGTV is considering picking up Asher and Whitney’s partly filmed show, but cracks are already appearing in the project — and in their marriage. Asher is needy, crushingly devoid of charisma, and has anger problems. Whitney is the world’s biggest busybody Karen, even as she flagellates herself for being one. The awkward Asher, whether on or off screen, can’t tell a single joke that lands, and Whitney is the kind of excruciatingly self-conscious liberal who tries so hard to say the right thing that she often says the wrong one. They’re trying to have a baby but are having trouble in the bedroom, the causes of which are both psychic and physical.
Asher and Whitney’s producer, the aggressive Dougie Schecter (the Safdie brothers’ Benny Safdie, who also co-created the show with Fielder), is pushing to get more drama and tension into Fliplanthropy, which so far is a dull “friction-less” show featuring a lot of shots of awkward locals mumbling platitudes. He cites, as a model, a recent reality dating show he developed, “Love to the Third Degree,” in which women compete to land a mystery man they don’t know is a burn victim.
There are more problems. Whitney’s parents (Corbin Bernsen and Constance Shulman) are property developers who live nearby. They’re widely considered slum lords, and Whitney is terrified that the public will discover the connection. She’s also trying to figure out why her friend Cara (Nizhonniya Austin), a hip Pueblo artist, seems less than enthused about having her art featured on Fliplanthropy. Asher, meanwhile, comes to believe he may have been cursed.
If all this sounds like a very funny premise for a television series, it is. But if you’re expecting The Curse to be a very funny show, it isn’t. Although there are some funny moments, especially in the earlier episodes, the series is far from a Christopher Guest-style mockumentary. It’s less a comedy than a dramatized satire like The White Lotus, with gentrifiers instead of rich vacationers. We watch as the distance between the artificial selves that Whitney and Asher project to the world and their reality grows wider and wider. As Whitney, Stone is brilliant at conveying a certain kind of over-emotive, strained sincerity, and Fielder is a surprisingly good dramatic actor, perhaps because he’s portraying a bizarro version of himself. Everyone plays it completely straight throughout. There are no winks and nods.
Using an unsettling, horror-movie-style score and weird camera angles, The Curse strives, perhaps strenuously at times, to keep us off-balance. When Whitney and Asher have huddled arguments, they’re often shown from a slight distance, the way a reality show or documentary might. Other times, the camera watches characters from behind cover, voyeuristically, in the style of a slasher film. We’re constantly seeing the couple through windows and mirrors, and though the motif isn’t exactly subtle (reflection — get it?), the cumulative effect of these choices is disorienting, like watching Eyes Wide Shut on a red-eye while drinking bad schnapps. Things get weirder and weirder until they culminate in one of the stranger finales you’ll likely ever see — inspiredly off-the-wall or infuriating, depending on your taste.
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Just because something is weird, of course, doesn’t always mean that it’s fun. The Curse is a show that is endured rather than enjoyed. By the third or fourth episode, my excitement for what came next had been replaced by a sighing dread. The fact that this was probably Fielder and Safdie’s intention was only partly a saving grace. Was it the dread that a skillful horror film evokes, or the dread brought by tedium or frustration? And did the show really need to be 10 hours long?
I do think I figured out Fielder’s larger project. He has often worked by carving up footage of other people for his own artistic ends. In The Curse, he plays a man whose reality is sliced and diced into a flattened and unflattering television portrayal. Now he’s the butt of the joke, and he knows it feels bad.
J. Oliver Conroy is a writer whose work has been published in the Guardian, New York magazine, the Spectator, the New Criterion, and other publications.
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