‘The Curse’ Is a Carnival of Misery. But Where Is It All Going?

This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of The Curse, which is now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime.

“The Fire Burns On” begins with a glimpse of an actual episode of Flip-lanthropy (or, as Whitney wants to retitle it, Green Queen). Whitney is displeased with what Dougie is showing her, complaining, “It just feels lifeless.” He pushes back and notes that she has already asked him to take out potential areas of conflict, like racial tensions and crime in Española, and the end result is a preachy show without any friction. The only way to salvage things, he argues, is to put more focus on the Seigel marriage, and to acknowledge the fact that Whitney is frequently annoyed by her annoying husband. He’s willing to disrupt their marriage, or worse, if it will help the show. And Whitney — who ultimately cares more about proving herself as an independent and progressive adult than she seems to care about Asher — decides to go along.

But if we pull back from the show-within-the-show and focus on The Curse itself as it enters the second half of its season, is it satisfying enough, or is it missing some key component just as much as the HGTV series is?

Six episodes in, certain things are clear. Stone, Fielder, and Safdie are all giving interesting performances. And Fielder, Safdie, and the various Curse directors have created an atmosphere of relentless dread and discomfort. But what’s it all in service of? And why is it taking so long for things to start happening?

“The Fire Burns On” is a bit plottier than recent installments, if only because Dougie is now actively messing with Asher, rather than being a creep and occasionally heckling from the sidelines. While filming a segment where the Seigels introduce passive energy to a local fire station, for instance, he encourages a hot firefighter to start flirting with Whitney. (And she, in turn, does not seem to mind any of that, whether she’s playing to the cameras or is genuinely interested in other men, as opposed to just acting that way in Asher’s cuckolding fantasies.)

And we also finally return to the question of whether Asher has been cursed. He’s alarmed to find chicken waiting for him in the sink of the firehouse’s bathroom, and spends the rest of the visit trying and failing to prove that Dougie put it there to mess with him. As he begins to worry that this is more evidence that Nala has actual supernatural powers, it’s as if Fielder and Safdie have abruptly remembered that Abshir and his daughters still exist and are meant to be a significant part of the show. We follow Abshir to the massage therapist Whitney is paying for, but the visit seems more like torture to him than something genuinely healing. And while doing more maintenance at the Questa Lane house, Asher begins testing Nala’s would-be psychic abilities by asking her to guess how many nails he’s holding, eventually taking things so far that he winds up with a bloody hand. And in he process, he inevitably scares her much more than she’s scared him so far.

Yet even with a more eventful script than usual, it’s hard not to wonder what the point is, and whether 10 episodes are needed to get to it. The filmmakers have created an impressively oppressive vibe, but a vibe in and of itself is a lot more effective as a two-hour film experience than as a collection of hour-long episodes you watch a week at a time over several months.

I’m recapping these episodes having already watched the entire season. But this isn’t an opinion I formed only after seeing what came after. This was my reaction in the moment watching “The Fire Burns On” specifically, and it was a concern that had been gradually building across previous installments. I won’t so much as hint at what’s coming, and whether the payoff is worth this mid-season formlessness. But TV is as much about the journey as the destination, if not more. And at this particular moment, it doesn’t feel like the journey of The Curse needs to be this long.

This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of The Curse, which is now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime.

“The Fire Burns On” begins with a glimpse of an actual episode of Flip-lanthropy (or, as Whitney wants to retitle it, Green Queen). Whitney is displeased with what Dougie is showing her, complaining, “It just feels lifeless.” He pushes back and notes that she has already asked him to take out potential areas of conflict, like racial tensions and crime in Española, and the end result is a preachy show without any friction. The only way to salvage things, he argues, is to put more focus on the Seigel marriage, and to acknowledge the fact that Whitney is frequently annoyed by her annoying husband. He’s willing to disrupt their marriage, or worse, if it will help the show. And Whitney — who ultimately cares more about proving herself as an independent and progressive adult than she seems to care about Asher — decides to go along.

But if we pull back from the show-within-the-show and focus on The Curse itself as it enters the second half of its season, is it satisfying enough, or is it missing some key component just as much as the HGTV series is?

Six episodes in, certain things are clear. Stone, Fielder, and Safdie are all giving interesting performances. And Fielder, Safdie, and the various Curse directors have created an atmosphere of relentless dread and discomfort. But what’s it all in service of? And why is it taking so long for things to start happening?

“The Fire Burns On” is a bit plottier than recent installments, if only because Dougie is now actively messing with Asher, rather than being a creep and occasionally heckling from the sidelines. While filming a segment where the Seigels introduce passive energy to a local fire station, for instance, he encourages a hot firefighter to start flirting with Whitney. (And she, in turn, does not seem to mind any of that, whether she’s playing to the cameras or is genuinely interested in other men, as opposed to just acting that way in Asher’s cuckolding fantasies.)

And we also finally return to the question of whether Asher has been cursed. He’s alarmed to find chicken waiting for him in the sink of the firehouse’s bathroom, and spends the rest of the visit trying and failing to prove that Dougie put it there to mess with him. As he begins to worry that this is more evidence that Nala has actual supernatural powers, it’s as if Fielder and Safdie have abruptly remembered that Abshir and his daughters still exist and are meant to be a significant part of the show. We follow Abshir to the massage therapist Whitney is paying for, but the visit seems more like torture to him than something genuinely healing. And while doing more maintenance at the Questa Lane house, Asher begins testing Nala’s would-be psychic abilities by asking her to guess how many nails he’s holding, eventually taking things so far that he winds up with a bloody hand. And in he process, he inevitably scares her much more than she’s scared him so far.

Yet even with a more eventful script than usual, it’s hard not to wonder what the point is, and whether 10 episodes are needed to get to it. The filmmakers have created an impressively oppressive vibe, but a vibe in and of itself is a lot more effective as a two-hour film experience than as a collection of hour-long episodes you watch a week at a time over several months.

I’m recapping these episodes having already watched the entire season. But this isn’t an opinion I formed only after seeing what came after. This was my reaction in the moment watching “The Fire Burns On” specifically, and it was a concern that had been gradually building across previous installments. I won’t so much as hint at what’s coming, and whether the payoff is worth this mid-season formlessness. But TV is as much about the journey as the destination, if not more. And at this particular moment, it doesn’t feel like the journey of The Curse needs to be this long.