The Curse's first teaser asks: Can you put out fires with the sun?

“Did you know you can put out fires with the sun?” Emma Stone asks, twice, in the first teaser for The Curse, the new Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie starring and produced series coming to Showtime. “No way,” Fielder responds. “Way,” she smiles back.

The Curse sees Fielder and Stone play a young couple trying to conceive while filming a home renovation show; the brief teaser is, presumably, them doing just that. See, while “putting out fires with the sun” may sound something like an influencer claiming they can cure blindness with willpower, it’s actually just their lede about fitting a fire station with solar panels. Ah, the power of literary oversimplification!

While this first trailer still conceals any details about The Curse’s plot that we didn’t already know, what we do get is a nice taste of the series’ tone. Stone and Fielder’s characters are overeager to the point of plasticity; for all we know, they’ve been sitting there saying those lines on a loop for an hour before we found them. Their pose and delivery are vaguely reminiscent of the twins in The Shining. This is cursed enough on its own, but it’s the dissonant twang of a metal string playing over their dialogue that really drives home the idea that something is wrong here on a spiritual, not just aesthetic, level.

The Curse debuts on the Showtime app/Paramount+ with Showtime on Friday, November 10; the show will also air on the Showtime channel on Sunday evenings at 10 p.m., starting on November 12. The first three episodes will also premiere at the New York Film Festival on Thursday, October 12.