For nine episodes, the Showtime series The Curse was an alluring provocation. A study of witless white ambition and the havoc it creates, the series—from Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie, and starring a searing Emma Stone (along with Fielder and Safdie)—felt like one of the most daring, transgressive things on television. It poked fun at empty land acknowledgments; it skewered reality TV; it documented the swift rot of a marriage built on aesthetics, in horrifyingly credible-comic fashion. What a thrill, that such piercing and strange art could be brought to bear on the realm of television.
I reviewed the Showtime series as such. I praised its laser-focused performances, its keen and sardonic awareness of the culture it was satirizing: home design shows, mostly found on HGTV, that seem totally unaware of the socioeconomic ills they are both working amongst and stirring up. But the truth was, I was not allowed, by embargo rules, to talk about the last episode of the series. So I could not say that that excruciating and pointless hour fatally undermines the entire project.
Which is not to say that I have been lying in wait to refute a review I myself wrote. I do genuinely love and admire nine episodes of The Curse; I think Fielder, Safdie, and Stone have created something miraculously unsettling, a vision of influencer culture as imperialism that could, and should, be studied as a daming document of our times. The Curse is a good show, if you don’t count its closing statement. (Or lack thereof.)
The finale begins in promising, if jarring, fashion. We have jumped in time from the filming of Whitney and Asher’s show to some nine months into the future. Whitney is finally pregnant, her show finally airing—albeit on a streaming service called HGTV Go Plus. (I guess these shrewd writers couldn’t have exactly predicted the consuming force of Warner Discovery.) So they’ve succeeded, in family and career ambitions. They’re beaming into Rachael Ray’s now defunct daytime talk show to do some promo, while Sopranos casualty Vincent Pastore is in-studio making grandma’s meatballs.
It’s a breathtakingly thorough bit of satire: Whitney and Asher’s debasem*nt is subtle, reduced to the quick-attention churn of the glowing TV economy to which they so aspire. Ray, who does a masterful job of pretending to be herself, isn’t being rude, exactly. She’s just not that interested in the high-tech, eco-fussy, ultimately hollow and self-regarding thing that Whitney and Asher are selling.
Which has been the whole joke of the show, that these arguably well-meaning clowns of questionable backgrounds have descended on a community to impose betterness on them. Of course, when they take that idea national, the nation (as represented by the indifference of a TV food queen and Big puss*) shrugs its shoulders. All the scrambling of the previous episodes of The Curse have been for nought. There is material gain—the show is sort of airing!—but the esteem has not arrived, and the marriage has not been fixed.
And what a brutal depiction of a marriage is offered up on The Curse. Love has rarely seemed more curdled, more compromised than it does on this show, this horrid picture of a nervous and unhappy bond so precisely and assiduously illustrated by Fielder and Stone. (Stone gives the breakneck-yet-controlled performance of her career; better even than 2023’s Poor Things, I would argue.)
The Curse has also been a sharp, if perhaps too often sneering, parody of the easy, fluffy home-reno entertainment that many of us guiltlessly enjoy. But that spoof is maybe not enough, not when so many intriguing narrative arcs have been established. There is a threat of gun violence, the threat of Whitney’s family past coming terribly to bear on her present. Yet The Curse finale settles none of those accounts. We do see some sort of resolution to the squatters narrative—Barkhad Abdi, from Captain Phillips, hilariously delivers a line about the hideous practicality of property taxes—but otherwise The Curse leaves us hanging.
Quite literally, I guess, for Asher. The defining portion of the finale involves Asher experiencing an upending of his physical life. Shortly after the Rachael Ray interview, Asher wakes up above his bed. It’s not a benign reverse-gravity situation, in which he could walk comfortably on the ceiling. He is instead being pressed up, and up, and up. He is being sucked out of the world, removed from it, perhaps a manifestation of his fears of impotence and uselessness, or finally suffering the cosmic consequences of the titular hex.
It’s really well done on a technical level. The digital effects are seamless—The Curse is a lo-fi show, so it’s quite something to see it take a wild magic-trick swing like this. But past that, it all feels like a snide cop-out, like Fielder and Safdie had no idea how to end their weird invention and thus had deus remove Asher from the machina.
