The Curse review: How reality TV culture killed the ‘real television’

As Fielder fans have slowly discovered over the years, scouring his eccentric, mildly discomforting YouTube comedy from years and years ago, the man himself seems troubled by something bizarre and unearthly, and which he attempts to exorcise on the screen. His shows are structured around a conceit, and this trick often depends on the largesse of the participating extras, who are real people with real accents, names, skin, and hair. The first season of The Curse, starring Fielder, co-creator Benny Safdie, and Emma Stone, ended this month (Paramount+); it presents Fielder at his inquisitive and contrite best, as he and his co-creator attempt to capture the woes of an increasingly demented time in television programming.

Nathan Fielder: an awkward person with an intelligent drawl

The 10-episode show is about a white couple (this is relevant) building a home renovation show for TV. These are all the rage in the US, in part because they give the median viewer a chance to ogle at obscene wealth and recoil from unseemly lack of imagination. Fielder and Stone are newlyweds who have an uneasy, deathly chemistry that is captured best in a jarring scene of intercourse early on in the season. Roleplay is fine; these two think the scenario of Fielder being cuckolded is hot. Yet the imagined presence of another man becomes a very real poltergeist, inviting lifelike screams of passion and revolt from the two, who are alone in their brightly-lit room.

It is heartbreaking to watch. You want to wash your face afterwards. In a world of unhoused people, home renovation is a luxury. It often involves replacing amber colours for grey and black, wood for metal, soul for chicness. This is what they do. Stone’s father is a known slumlord, selling houses to the underprivileged at sky-high prices. Stone-and-Fielder’s TV programme attempts to, in some way, whitewash this tarred legacy by creating environmentally-sound houses, replete with the faux artsiness of modern modern art, and glass windows against which birds strike and drop, dead “often”.

It is important to understand that Fielder’s body of work follows a personal theme. That is to say, in the same way as Michael Schur (creator and/or producer of The Office, The Good Place, Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn Nine-Nine) seems to be obsessed with finding the human truth through collaborative sitcoms, Fielder attempts to mine himself through his shows. His performance inside his creations and in public appearances is a crafted artifice, and his shtick is that he never breaks character. He is an awkward person with an intelligent drawl. If you were alone with him in an alleyway you’d call the police.

On the most popular talk shows in the US and the rest of the world, such as those of Conan O’Brien or Jimmy Kimmel, he has not shied away from using his tongue-in-cheek, imp-capable-of-murder turn of mind to generate queasy humour. On Conan, the joke was that he is a closeted homosexual who is into old men, clips of whom he watches while having cereal, selfies taken during which he posted on his personal Instagram. On Kimmel, he repeated a former guest’s story (from the same day, no less), in order to parody the humdrum celebrity anecdotes that are the toast of tinseltown.

A spiral of misfortune for the wizard of loneliness

In the first episode of The Curse, Fielder and Safdie, who is portraying a seedy showrunner, are out in some shopping lot. They are struck with the idea of filming Fielder giving away a hundred dollars to young, unhoused kids selling bracelets. After it’s shot, Fielder trots back to the girls and asks back the hundred dollars. He says it was for show purposes only: “It’s sunny out. October heat. Seeing this made me ask: would I want my hundred-dollar bill back? I own several properties in San Pedro, what is a hundred bucks to me?”

Fielder, however, pries the money out of their hands and says he will bring back smaller change. He spends too much time at a shady ATM trying to get lower denominations of currency. When he runs back, the girls are gone. He remembers one of them saying, quite earnestly, “I curse you.” Thus begins a spiral of misfortune for the wizard of loneliness, starting with his wife suffering an ectopic pregnancy, and ending with, in the final episode, him flying off into space.

In Nathan For You, his first show that is now a cult classic, relatively normal things happen. The premise is that in each episode, Fielder helps one or more small businesses across the US ratchet up their sales. These are pyrrhic victories because the achieved success is at great cost to the business owners, both of dignity and finances. In the first episode, to drive up interest for an ice-cream parlour, he invents poop-flavoured ice cream, stating that the novelty of this particular taste would get them more footfall. In another episode, in order to help out a coffee shop, he invents a parody establishment called “Dumb Starbucks”, a real outlet that received massive, nay, humongous news coverage in 2014. In another, in the spirit of assisting a bar get more patrons, he flouts the no-smoking-indoors rule by converting the bar to experimental theatre, where normal, unsuspecting drinkers are made into caricatures of small-town life, with the value being in the observation of it, a Godardian trope carried beyond term.

In all of these hacks and business tactics, Fielder portrays himself, Nathan Fielder, a TV presenter with a bachelor’s degree in commerce, in which he received “really good grades”, as he states in the opening slide of every episode. He is acutely aware of the harebrained core of these schemes, and yet, through years of on-the-street interviews for other channels and programmes, he has cottoned onto the realisation, as have countless reality TV programmers, that people will do anything if there is a large camera lens trained on them.

Something about the possibility of being watched by thousands, if not millions, and being seen as unpliable or uncool is deeply concerning to them. It is for this reason that they never say no to him, although of course their assent to these programmes is mumbled, reluctant, and forced. This flattening effect of reality TV is utilised by a vile Fielder to absurdly successful comedic effect because everyone except him is a real person with a job outside being on the show, and the fact that they would partake in shenanigans of this sort is plain laughable. And profound.

The camera’s inner world

Nathan For You closed out with a one-hour special in 2017, ‘Finding Frances’, where he helps an old man relocate a lost flame, after he fumbled his romantic fortunes in his early 20s. There is parallelism on full blast here: as Bill, the oldie, gives out details about his high-school sweetheart, Fielder is consumed with his own pain of being hopelessly single. One can’t tell if it is the screen-Fielder who’s grieving his status as such, but the actor carries the same personality outside the show, so your guess is as good as mine.

But it contains the seed to his future experiments in television. Over the five or so years of conceptualising Nathan For You, what becomes clear to even viewers with a cavalier disregard for subtlety is that he is manipulating perfectly innocent people, expropriating their kindness and generosity of participation to create humour. It is apparent where he gets a random, real man absolutely drunk after chatting him up in a bar (another bar), and then makes him wear a gigantic, obtrusive suit, and then makes him walk through an antique shop where this stranger inevitably knocks down stuff, which breaks. Earlier, the scheme Fielder had come up with in this episode is that the shop owner should set up the if-you-break-it-you-buy-it policy. Thus forcing this inebriated person through the shop, he extracts the first victim of a devilish scheme.

Fielder was a young man then, almost a decade ago, and the headiness of having a show with his name on it may have driven him overboard. It now eats away at his heart. So, in The Curse, he seeks to at least address it. The little girl? She is the embodiment of the continued befuddlement of people who have undergone some time through the reality TV matrix, and now want to rebel against it. Ask any rapscallion who’s been on MTV’s Roadies, any hustler who participated in Shark Tank India. The inner world of a camera is a universe with its own rules, a machine which presses authenticity of spirit to squeeze out ready-to-serve entertainment.

A Fielderian irony

The Curse is created with two diabolical targets: to torture Nathan Fielder and to inflame the audiences who previously, blithely, enjoyed the slipstream machinations of his earlier crimes against humanity. This surfaces in the form of many real-life conversations that are in vogue in several social circles, including those of India, such as the appropriation of indigenous art, the fetishisation of other cultures and their artefacts, artists succumbing to marketability which effectively eclipses their original talent. One scene has an indigenous artist indulge in performance art where she shaves off strips of turkey flesh, and the guest, patron, fan, whatever, eats it, after which the artist screams, “Why did you do that?”. It is explained later that the artist was actually shaving off her indigenous roots for mass consumption.

But, most of all, the show is about gentrification: how a foreign people with resources destroy the natural course of life, and an artificiality of endeavour that conceals something meaner and inhuman. In staging the home renovation show, the match-made-in-hell are effectively driving up property prices, and are also in talks with commercial food chains to set up shop in these new homes. One scene literally has Fielder drill through the keyhole in an abandoned house, causing poor squatters to flee through the window.

There are numerous other tragedies that Fielder-the-creator unleashes against his character, all as some sort of punishment for attempting to capitalise on the pristine, camera-unready people in a previous avatar, including showing him having a micro-penis, and repeatedly being referred to as unfunny and awkward himself. People who know Fielder from his earlier adventures know how painful this is to watch. Fielder is that rare artist trying to learn from and rise above the evils of an industry he has been a cherished part of. That he chooses to do so through another televised outing is both a comedy and a tragedy, an irony that is delicious, rich, supple, and wholly Fielderian.