Review: The Curse, “Land of Enchantment” | Season 1, Episode 1

Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie team up for a funny, thoroughly discomfiting new dark comedy

Photo Credit: John Paul Lopez/A24/Paramount+ with Showtime.

Welcome to Episodic Medium’s coverage of Showtime’s The Curse, which debuts on Fridays ahead of its linear debut on Sundays. This first review is free for all, but subsequent reviews will be exclusively for paid subscribers. To learn more, check out our About Page, and for future updates on shows we’re covering become a free subscriber.

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One day in 2018, I showed a friend of mine the first episode of Nathan for You. I like to think I’m good at telling who will like which TV shows, and I figured she’d enjoy it; I remembered watching that same episode in college a few years before and instantly being enchanted, laughing alone in my bedroom harder than I had at any TV show in a while. But she spent most of the episode looking mildly amused at best and vaguely confused at worst, never going so far as to laugh out loud. If anything, she seemed alarmed by my response.

Most of Nathan Fielder’s mainstream projects have garnered glowing reviews, but they’re also made to polarize. A contingent of viewers had qualms about his style of docu-reality cringe comedy in Nathan for You, with some accusing him of punching down and taking advantage of unsuspecting small business owners. Ethical murkiness was even more baked into the premise of The Rehearsal, Fielder’s mind-blowing HBO docu-comedy that critiqued itself all the way through its own season finale. (Knowing that a second season is coming inspires both excitement and dread, in equal measure.) In my book, those six episodes of TV were among the best of 2022—but I fully understand why so many people wouldn’t connect to them. After all, if Nathan for You freaked out my friend, I can’t imagine how she’d react to The Rehearsal.

The Curse, Fielder’s newest exercise in secondhand embarrassment, raises fewer ethical dilemmas, just by virtue of being purely fiction. This is feel-bad TV in many ways, but no real human beings were harmed or thrown into an eternal existential tailspin during the making of this series. Of course, there’s a new key voice involved this time: Benny Safdie, who co-wrote all ten episodes with Fielder and lends his own claustrophobic, intense style of filmmaking to the proceedings. With Daniel Lopatin (aka Oneohtrix Point Never) on board contributing a deeply unnerving score that might actually rival his music for Good Time and Uncut Gems, it’s always very clear we’re watching a Safdie project.

But I keep coming back to Fielder, whether that’s because of my general love for his work or the direct thematic through-line from Nathan for You to The Curse. For one, there’s the theme of performance, a key area of interest for Fielder: “Smokers Allowed,” one of the best episodes of Nathan for You, used a bar to stage “plays” based on mundane interactions from other nights at the same bar. That episode and the series finale, “Finding Frances,” both seemed to directly inspire The Rehearsal, where performance is the whole point.

Photo Credit: Richard Foreman Jr./A24/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME

Central to The Curse are two performers: Asher (Fielder) and Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone), co-stars of a new HGTV-aspiring show being produced by Asher’s old camp buddy Dougie Schecter (Safdie). The ostensible reason for setting Flipanthropy in the town of Española, New Mexico is to help out a struggling community, but it’s clear from the beginning that it’s all bullshit. The Siegels are good old-fashioned gentrifiers, trying to convince themselves they’re virtuous by using a national platform to fix a town that didn’t necessarily need fixing. Española’s actual problems can’t be solved with a trio of white people focused on turning a profit for HGTV. The Siegels are only performing the role of “good people,” a phrase spoken multiple times in this first episode.

Described that way, the show sounds like a pretty familiar but reliable type of eat-the-rich satire. And make no mistake, there are some real moments of hilarity here—though, again, your mileage will vary. I guffawed during the peek at one of Dougie’s previous projects that didn’t get picked up: Love to the Third Degree, a tasteless Love Is Blind-meets-The Bachelor type reality dating show where the masked bachelor turns out to be the survivor of a serious apartment fire. (“It’s like playing a prank on a burn victim,” a horrified Whitney observes.) That bit wouldn’t feel out of place in a showbiz satire like The Other Two or 30 Rock.

But The Curse feels altogether weirder than those descriptions can capture. It doesn’t feel like any other show I can remember watching, really; it brought me back to watching The Rehearsal, but that’s about it. Part of it is the general aesthetic, informed by both the score and the look of the shots: there’s a relative lack of intimate close-ups on faces, with the camera usually a distant, leering observer slowly zooming in voyeuristically or hovering in place like a surreptitious paparazzo.

Even without those formal tricks, though, the material here is plenty unsettling. It goes back to that theme of performance, and Fielder’s fascination with the way people succeed or fail at lying to themselves. It’s fitting that while Whitney excels at performing—Dougie’s later remark about her ability to “brighten the room” shows that she’s the real star of Flipanthropy—Asher is far less natural. He’s not comfortable in his own skin and with his own brain, let alone trying to shape himself into the effortlessly smooth, charming husband character that a successful show might require.

Photo Credit: Richard Foreman Jr./A24/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME

You can see the mask slip in two particularly interesting moments, one right after the other, during an interview with local news. First, there’s the slight stumble during his transparent recitation of a script about eco-friendly brands. (Stone’s small, almost maternal nod of encouragement speaks volumes.) Then there’s possibly the most pulse-quickening moment in “Land of Enchantment”: Asher aggressively confronting the reporter and ordering her to look at him when he’s talking to her. It’s a slip-up that Whitney would never make, and she clearly resents him for his inability to match her professionalism.

It’s both jarring and thrilling to see Fielder playing a real character this time, not just himself; his line deliveries aren’t uniformly flawless like Stone’s, but the occasionally stilted quality is actually an asset for highlighting the artifice of the character. He’s uncharismatic in exactly the way that the worst reality TV hosts can be. You can tell that in theory Asher might like to loosen up and “be the clown” like his father-in-law (Corbin Bernsen, creepy and funny), but he’s just not equipped with the confidence.

There’s a lot of potential in that character story, and in this complex dynamic between two partners who only seem to be pretending to love (or even like) each other. What I’m most curious to see, going forward, is how tightly The Curse stays rooted in their perspectives. The White Lotus fueled lots of discourse in its first season for Mike White’s controversial decision to stay locked on the (mostly) white resort guests without ever truly humanizing the few native Hawaiian staff characters, and I expect this show to generate similar conversation.

Photo Credit: Richard Foreman Jr./A24/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME

So far, The Curse’s strategy seems comparable. The supporting characters of color basically exist as potential victims for the selfish, performative “allies” at the center—or as props used to challenge or bring out the leads’ undoubtedly classist, racist preconceptions. Of course, it’s clear that’s a deliberate choice, as in The White Lotus. No matter what happens in Española and no matter what happens with Flipanthropy, the privileged Siegels will be largely insulated from any real struggle, while the longtime Españolans likely bear the brunt of their failures. If characters like Fernando (Christopher Calderon) come across as props, it’s because that’s how Asher, Whitney, and Dougie use them. Just look at the way Dougie shamelessly dabs water on Fernando’s sick mother’s eyes to make her cry for the camera in the opening scene. She’s just television for him, not a real person.

The same goes for Nala (Dahabo Ahmed), a young girl used by Asher and Dougie to, once again, prove Asher’s moral fiber for the camera. On its own, the image of a minor Black character like Nala “cursing” a white person, followed by horror-movie music cues, might be cause for alarm, or at least skepticism. But it’s immediately clear here that the moment isn’t meant to be taken at face value; it’s Asher who projects those expectations onto the experience, and Whitney who validates what he’s thinking.

Already, it feels like the title of this show comes with scare quotes. What remains to be seen is what exactly The Curse chooses to do with those tensions. Based on this premiere, I know I’ll enjoy the ride either way—if “enjoy” is really the right word.

Stray observations

• Asher’s discomfort with giving out his PIN is framed as a case of gentrifier paranoia, especially with his later diligence in calling his bank. But, I mean … I think it’s a pretty reasonable thing to feel uncomfortable about? Maybe the one moment when I saw where he was coming from.

• There are too many uncomfortable scenes to name, but I really felt like I wasn’t supposed to be watching that sex scene. One notable detail: Asher declining to take his “turn,” preferring to watch his wife finish with “Steven.”

• The repetition of the lyric “the fire burns on” during the trailer for Love to the Third Degree might’ve been my biggest laugh of the episode.

• The agonizingly long pause followed by Fielder’s murmured delivery of “Black, I think” killed me.

• It’s also interesting to see Asher desperately give his $100 bill away to a homeless single mom when he can’t find the family he’s actually looking for. There are two different ways this is self-serving: he needs to give the money away so he can lie to Whitney about where it went, but some part of him also probably thinks he’s rebalancing the karmic scales.

• What do we make of the final close-up on Asher, followed by his glance at the camera? The quick tilt before the credits made me feel like a Peeping Tom getting caught.