Showtime/YouTube
The Curse,a new series premiering this weekend on both Showtime and Paramount+ with Showtime, is an epic masterpiece of cringe comedy — 10 weekly episodes of engulfing discomfort, pain and despair.Whether you laugh or not is almost beside the point. You will, actually, but your knees will remain unslapped and there won’t be many giggles, snorts or guffaws to fill the empty air of your room. Laughter here doesn’t sound too far off from a death rattle.I have a feeling I’m not selling the show very well. So, for now, let’s pile on the superlatives and say thatThe Curseis unsparing, daring, endlessly fascinating, altogether extraordinary and bracingly original. Better?
Whitney is preeningly sensitive to the area’s Indigenous culture but also slightly condescending. Asher is clammy, hot-tempered and cloddish. He always looks as if he’s wilting in the sun, like escarole thrown into a sauté pan.
Their producer, Dougie (Benny Safdie), previously concocted a gruesomeBachelorknockoff (we see a clip), and is inordinately proud of it. He has long dank hair, parted in the middle, that gives him the air of a failed Apostle or Al Yankovic after a trim. He’s repugnant.
Safdie and Fielder are co-creators ofThe Curse,and both of them are experts in discomfort. Safdie directed (with brother Josh) the excruciatingly intenseAdam Sandler2019 filmUncut Gems.Fielder is best known for the squirm-inducing seriesThe Rehearsal.It’s hard to imagine what they must be like together when they’re off somewhere collaborating — do they make each other’s skin crawl, then call it a day? If they’d directedThe Lord of the Rings, it would have been nothing but Golom.
Fielder and Stone: Who’ll climb out of the wreckage?.a24/paramount+; showtime
a24/paramount+; showtime
I suspect I still haven’t made you believe this show is worth your time. You might be thinking that you could just as easily rewatchTed Lasso.Hannah Waddinghamis so zesty and charming!
What Safdie and Fielder have created onCurse,at least on the surface level, is a sharp, unstinting satire of White privilege and guilt (Whitney is constantly having to distance herself from her parents, who are widely regarded as slumlords). It’s also an expert parody of reality programming and its dishonesty. ButCurseis really an uncomfortably intimate and nuanced portrait of the Siegels’s fraying marriage.
It’s as if filmmaker Albert Brooks directedJon & Kate Plus 8.(Brooks is the subject of an excellent new documentary on Max,Albert Brooks: Defending My Life, launching Nov. 11.)
Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder in ‘The Curse’.Showtime/YouTube
None of this will prepare you forThe Curse’sending, which is exhilaratingly funny yet absolutely terrifying. It will make you rethink the entire series, and also maybe wonder if you didn’t catch your own reflection in one of the Siegels’s mirrored houses.
By now you must be itching to watchThe Curse.Aren’t you?
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The Curse’s first episode launches Friday on Paramount+ with Showtime, and premieres on Showtime Sunday at 10 p.m.
source: people.com
