The Curse is a weird (and wonderful) maze of a show

What to know before you watch The Curse, Showtime's fully bizarre new show. vox.com/culture CULTURE   I’m between good TV shows right now, so I was thrilled to read Alissa Wilkinson’s [piece this week]( exploring The Curse, a new, 10-episode series created by Nathan Fielder, Benny Safdie, and Emma Stone. I’m also prepared for the possibility that I’ll never fully understand it. “The Curse is ... a drama? But also a comedy,” Wilkinson writes. “And kind of a satirical take on HGTV-style house-flipping shows, except it’s also about native land rights in northern New Mexico, but also gentrification, and marriage. Squint and some other stuff shows up, maybe: Judaism, mysticism, ethics in documentary, trendy environmentalism, guilty liberalism, and other truly undefinable swivels that I, having watched the whole series, can’t stop thinking about.” As a fan of everything Nathan Fielder does, and a believer that more TV shows and movies should be weird, count me in. This piece is a little bittersweet: Alissa, our “resident Nathan Fielder whisperer,” is leaving us after this week to [become a critic]( for the New York Times. We’ll miss having her as a colleague, but we’re excited for her incisive criticism to reach new readers. —[Marin Cogan](, senior correspondent Editor's note: For ongoing coverage and analysis of the developing conflict between Israel and Hamas, [read our Vox colleagues' work here](. The Curse is a fully bizarre and brilliant maze of a show [photo of Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone in The Curse]( Beth Garrabrant/A24/Paramount+ with SHOWTIME Few things are more irksome than the contemporary impulse (I think we can blame it on Lost) to decode every TV show as though it’s a puzzle to be solved instead of a story to be savored. But sometimes a close reading is the point. It’s how creators force audiences to lean in, set aside the phone, and immerse themselves in trying to figure out what’s going on. [The Curse is a lean-in show if ever there was one.]( Created by Benny Safdie (one-half of the Uncut Gems filmmaking duo) and evil comedic genius Nathan Fielder, and starring the pair alongside the inimitable Emma Stone, The Curse is ... a drama? But also a comedy. And kind of a satirical take on HGTV-style house-flipping shows, except it’s also about native land rights in northern New Mexico, but also gentrification, and marriage. Squint and some other stuff shows up, maybe: Judaism, mysticism, ethics in documentary, trendy environmentalism, guilty liberalism, and other truly undefinable swivels that I, having watched the whole series, can’t stop thinking about. A colleague recently called me Vox’s “resident Nathan Fielder whisperer” — probably because I filed around [6,000]( [words]( on The Rehearsal, his mystifying six-episode HBO miniseries that aired in the summer of 2022 — and even I have been scratching my head about The Curse. In a good way, though. There’s not too much I can or should say about the series’ specifics, which unfolds across 10 roughly hour-long episodes (and will be released weekly). To fully enjoy it, though, it’s helpful to know the various sandboxes in which the creators are playing. The setting, for instance, [poses some intriguing questions](. Though the story is fictional, it’s set in the northern New Mexican city of Española, not far from Santa Fe, and largely shot around there. While the latter is a tiny and more or less gentrified city where some of the country’s richest people live, the former is more working-class, a diverse city whose population includes American Indians as well as descendants of Spanish settlers. It’s also worth noting that a major employer in Española is Los Alamos National Laboratory, where the Manhattan Project was developed — an interesting data point for a show that’s out the same year as Oppenheimer. The Española setting and the production’s choice to find its cast mostly in New Mexico suggest a raft of issues around which The Curse revolves. There’s the interaction between native pueblos and their land rights and the long history of encroachment on native rights, particularly by white Americans. In The Curse, that becomes a telescoping metaphor; gentrification of the kind the characters engage in is just the latest phase in a very old story. [Read the full story »](  [Learn more about RevenueStripe...]( The long, long Hollywood strikes have ended SAG-AFTRA and the AMPTP have reached a tentative agreement. [Read the full story »]( What happened to Airbnb? Financially, the sharing economy darling is thriving, but guests, hosts, and cities have had enough. [Read the full story »](   Support our work We aim to explain what we buy, why we buy it, and why it matters. Support our mission by making a gift today. 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