Showtime's The Curse is the Best Thing on TV

hope springs eternal...

I’ve become accustomed to avoiding almost everything Hollywood puts out. I only watch movies if I have to, and I rarely venture into the land of streaming. I have become phobic of wokeness erupting at any moment. When people tell me something is funny or is good satire, I always have to think about their version of what satire means. Most of the time, what doesn’t bother other people bothers me.

If it takes me out of the story because I am suddenly aware of the white guilt of the filmmakers or the performative nature of the piece to “educate” audiences to “do better,” I’m out. I’ll force myself to watch it if I have to, but I’ll take it at the first sign of trouble if I can pull the escape hatch.

The first time I heard of The Curse, now streaming on Showtime or Paramount+, was a comment by Oppenheimer director Christopher Nolan, who said it was brilliant. Of course, I knew that one of the writers of The Curse is Benny Safdie, who plays Edward Teller in Oppenheimer, so I thought that’s just Nolan doing his friend a solid.

It is, as they say, my cup of tea. It’s weird. It’s funny. It’s awkward. It’s sometimes mysterious and opaque. Everything is brilliant, from the writing to the acting to the directing. Mostly, this series lampoons the woke in all of their hypocritical glory. But it isn’t a “white people bad, everyone else good” series either. It is an equal-opportunity satire where almost none of the characters escape unscathed.

Here is a brief summary. A married couple, Whitney and Asher, decide to invest in a small town near Los Alamos called Espanola. She comes from wealthy parents who have made their money being slum lords. Whitney wants to bring her environmentally “passive homes” to the area and try to preserve the heritage, etc.

But they’re also filming a reality show called Flipanthropy. We don’t see the show, but we see their real lives and how they’ve manufactured a reality of how they want the world to see them. Here is a review from YouTube.

The Curse never panders and never flinches. The concept of “land acknowledgments” stretched out over ten episodes. It’s extraordinary at times, graphic in places (the size of the husband’s penis is an “issue”), and the ending is a head-scratcher that’s up for interpretation. I think I know what it means, but I won’t spoil it.

Here is the fake pilot episode of their reality show depicting a reality that does not exist in the real world of the people in The Curse.

The Curse is not going to be for everyone. For me, it was the kind of truth in art and storytelling that rarely gets made anymore. It gave me hope for the future.