The Curse

Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie co-created this one, and they cast themselves opposite Emma Stone as a married couple, Asher and Whitney Siegel, shooting a well-meaning HGTV pilot in Española, New Mexico. The show is called "Fliplanthropy," and the premise is that they're building passive, mirror-clad eco-homes for a low-income neighborhood while also, quietly, gentrifying it. Safdie plays their producer, Dougie, a grief-warped reality TV lifer who keeps nudging the couple toward better footage. The first episode establishes the rules: a small interaction with a child outside a store, a whispered curse, and from there the marriage, the show-within-the-show, and Asher's sense of himself all start to warp around it.

Fielder is doing something no one else is doing on television. He plays Asher as a man who has rehearsed every sentence twice and still gets the tone wrong, and it is genuinely painful to watch in the way "Nathan For You" was painful, only stretched to feature length. Emma Stone is the discovery here. Whitney is a specific kind of educated white woman who has convinced herself her ambition is service, and Stone plays her without ever winking at the camera. Safdie directs several episodes and brings the handheld, prickly, over-the-shoulder discomfort of "Uncut Gems" to what is technically a domestic drama. The sound design deserves its own paragraph. Whispered dialogue, HVAC hum, cameras clicking on and off — the show weaponizes ambient noise until you're bracing before anything happens.

It's slow. Ten hours slow. Scenes hold on a single awkward beat for a full minute past when a normal show would cut, and if that isn't your idea of tension you'll bail by episode three. The Curse also asks you to sit with characters who are unpleasant on purpose, and there's no relief valve, no charming best friend, no romp episode. Some of the satire lands with a thud instead of a scalpel, particularly around the art-world subplots involving Whitney's collector clients. And the ending, which I won't touch, is divisive enough that a chunk of the audience will feel the whole run was a bait-and-switch.

If you loved "The Rehearsal," or you sat through "Beau Is Afraid" and wanted more, this is calibrated for you. Fans of Yorgos Lanthimos, early Todd Solondz, and the Safdies' own filmography will find their people. If your reference points are "Ted Lasso" or a comfort rewatch of "The Office," quit early and save yourself the argument. Think prestige cringe with a horror undertone rather than a marriage dramedy.

Worth it because the craft is doing the talking. The show has plenty on its mind — gentrification, performative philanthropy, the ethics of documentary television, the specific way white liberal guilt curdles into control — but it delivers those ideas through Whitney's smile tightening, through Asher's throat-clearing, through a camera lingering on a house that reflects the neighborhood back at itself. Nobody monologues. Nobody wins an argument to applause. The politics are the plot, not a sermon layered on top of it, and that's why it earns the tier instead of the one below. Patience required. Reward delivered.