Nathan Fielder, The Awkward Court Jester, Goes Dark with The Curse

Three episodes into Showtime’s The Curse and it’s clear that the awkward and befuddled Nathan Fielder we’ve come to expect from time spent with him in his shows Nathan for You or The Rehearsal has left the building. Each new episode is a masterclass in restrained tension, as we witness, in horror, the large and small follies of clueless white saviors Asher (Fielder) and Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone). The cringe laughs that have become the hallmark of Fielder’s anthropological experiments with everyday people in the “reality” TV format are still present, but they play out with a very different vibe that’s chilling yet impossible to look away from. The Curse is the Frankenstein-ed love child of every sinister subtext that Fielder and co-creator Benny Safdie have been toying with for the last decade, becoming the “What is this?” and “Why am I watching this?” series of 2023.

If you’ve hung with The Curse to date, it’s been a hoot taking in the melange of bizarreness that Fielder, Safdie, and Stone have been serving up. Fielder and Stone’s comedy chops and ability to change tone on a dime work in lockstep with Safdie’s gift for ratcheting up the squirm levels until we, and the characters, can’t take it anymore. The trio are masters at milking an uncomfortable scene beyond its acceptable limit, and then goosing it to go even longer. In just three episodes, we’ve got the staggering examples of Asher’s harassment of young Nala (Hikmah Warsame) to get his reality TV “philanthropy” donation back; Whitney’s “spontaneous” Instagram live sweater wrestle with Asher, and Dougie’s (Safdie) twisted first date that is chock-full of unwanted confessions. So far, the series is a tumbleweed of sequences that are relentless in churning up the ugly underbellies of these people. 

Perhaps the most creatively freeing aspect of The Curse for Fielder is that it’s scripted, which allows him to take the awkward imp character he’s honed for over a decade and twist it into the ever so tightly wound Asher. For years across multiple projects, Fielder has used his non-threatening looks and accommodating countenance to lull his marks (and his audiences) into accepting him as an innocuous, yet off-kilter Master of Ceremonies for his “studies” of human behavior. There’s always been a hint of something “not right” bubbling under the surface of Fielder’s schtick. But it’s never gotten in the way of luring his subjects into being open and candid with Fielder in ways that have made his previous shows such interesting and funny exposés on the oddities of our species. 

Now, Fielder’s turning our trust in that persona against us in The Curse. There are similarities to what he did before in the DNA of Asher, drafting him as a seemingly average and inconsequential person on our planet. But Asher’s almost pathological need to please his driven but deeply misguided eco-crusader wife is what also makes him wholly unmoored and terrifying.