The Curse, a 10 part comedy drama, or dramedy if you will, is the ultimate in car-crash television. It’s horrendously uncomfortable to have to watch, and yet you can’t take your eyes off of it.
Created, written and produced by a combination of its three principals, the series revolves around the marriage of Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder, and the reality TV show his college friend Benny Safdie is making about them and the work they do.
Stone and Fielder are a patchwork quilt of every conceivable liberal urge. They buy up properties in under-serviced, peripheral suburbs – i.e. the ones where black and brown skinned people eke out their meagre existences — and replace existing dwellings with eco-friendly, ultra-modern and over-priced monstrosities.
Their endless talk of investing in local communities and nurturing indigenous talent does nothing to hide the fact that all they are in fact engaged in is a rapacious gentrification scheme designed to make them a shed-load of money, that they’re trying forlornly to dress up in liberal frills and bows.
As the episodes progress, each aspect of their archetypally liberal façade is unmasked to reveal a monstrous mess of neurosis fed on an entrenched sense of entitled privilege.
And throughout all of which, it’s – at least initially – unclear whether Safdie intends gleefully exposing this in the reality show he’s making around their exploits. Or whether he too is caught up in the glare of their ambition and the vortex of their solipsism.
Could he conceivably turn out to be even more self-centred than they are? Or is there the chance that something interesting might actually result from what he’s shooting?
We are then very much on the same terrain that Ricky Gervais mapped out in the original The Office series, and where Curb Your Enthusiasm went in some of its earlier episodes. Genuinely painful to behold, and absolutely riveting.
This is what television can do when three incredibly gifted individuals decide to pool their talents to expose what lies underground, beneath the surface of the society we’ve constructed for ourselves. And the less you know about any of the particulars, the more you’ll get out of watching it.
Watch the trailer for The Curse here:
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