The Curse recap: “We are good on paper”

We are one episode away from the season-one finale of The Curse, and I keep having just one question on my mind. Who is Whitney Siegel, really? Or maybe the better question we should be asking ourselves is: Who is Whitney Rhodes?

Is she a young woman eager to make a difference in the world, hoping to build passive homes and help local communities in her hometown of Española? Or is she a craven narcissist eager to leverage a devoted husband to launder her reputation away from the wealth and bad press her parents are addled by? Is she a canny producer of reality TV who sees the potential for a rebrand by her lonesome as “the Green Queen”? Or is she a woman floundering amid conflicting directions who doesn’t yet know what she wants, what she’s got, and what she may reap—either as a wife, a mother, let alone an entrepreneur, a designer, or an artist?

That Emma Stone manages to contain the answers to all of these questions up in the air while keeping Whitney both at arm’s length and yet in discomforting closeness may well be the most thrilling part of this Showtime dramedy. This is a heck of a high-wire act: You’re never quite sure how deep Whitney’s own self-delusions run nor how close she is to truly losing it. Watching her unravel is fascinating, even if she often seems in a lot more control than, say, Asher (Nathan Fielder), who’s been openly spiraling since he first thought a young Black girl cursed him. How else to explain away how his marriage has been falling apart at the seams these past few weeks?

With “Young Hearts” we finally get a clearer vision both of what Flipanthropy is looking like right now and what the network itself may want for it moving forward. Dougie (Benny Safdie) continues to shoot our favorite fake buying couple as they goof off at the clothing store while buying jeans—a scene that pleases the HGTV network exec. She wants Asher and Whitney to recreate it, the better to show off how well the two get along. Because, shocker, unlike what Dougie’s been telling Whitney, us, and probably himself, HGTV is not really in the market for a flipping houses show where the central couple is at the verge of divorcing. I mean, who’d watch such a dour portrait? And so, while he and Whitney have clearly been spending some time crafting and exaggerating (maybe? or is it merely revealing?) this friction between the young couple, they are now faced with the prospect of losing the show if Whitney and Asher don’t stay together as a loving, devoted couple. Watching Whitney hear this is akin to seeing her world crumble around her. Perhaps she was already envisioning a world where she’d go at it alone, no longer held down by the humorless, awkward “jester” that Asher is. But now she must backtrack and right the ship once more. If only for the cameras.

It’s why she’s all giggles as Asher tries on very tight jeans. Why she playfully eats baked goods with him at the coffee shop. And why, even when the cameras aren’t rolling (knowing, perhaps, she needs to put in some quality time with him ahead of dinner with the HGTV exec) she’s all sunny smiles as she tries to convince herself that maybe this marriage is the way forward. The only way forward, really.

For what does she have otherwise? A maiden last name that continues to haunt her. Most recently, she learns that a crew member has been let go because he’d left a note that read SLUMLORD on Whitney’s car, a reference to her parents’ brutal rental practices at the Bookends apartments. It’s the kind of bad press she’s been trying to run away from—even if there are still images on the web that show her gleefully smiling at the opening of that housing complex (found only if you Google “Whitney Rhodes”; everything you find when you do the same for “Whitney Siegel” is all about being green, sustainable, and all of that fun design stuff). In true Whitney fashion, she tries to reverse the firing, only to learn that a driver on the crew is dealing with a family member who’s been evicted from the apartment building with (so Whitney hears) little notice.

Ever the white savior, she goes ahead and tries her hand at solving the issue—even going so far as meeting her parents at Bookends and accusing them of being horrid landlords who care only about money and little for the community. It’s a high horse to stand on but that’s never given Whitney any pause, less so here even when she hears the story about how the guy they’ve just evicted had gutted the apartment they’d rented to him and sold all the appliances for cash. So, not a great tenant. Still, the tiff between the three shows they’re all never going to see eye to eye on this—not when Whitney thinks she’s on a crusade to help disenfranchised communities and everyone else is, well, trying to make a profit and could care less about whoever’s involved.

That’s clearly what’s also at the heart of the notes the HGTV exec gives them while they’re all out to dinner. She loves Whitney and Asher’s whole “holistic” approach to climate change and sustainability and the like. But, obviously, she knows when it comes to the show they can’t really tackle everything. Is she aware she’s contradicting herself (as Whitney notes, “holistic” very much encourages one to address more than one issue at a time). But her notes are all about wanting to see sustainability and green energy (re)packaged as an aesthetic ideal. And so, much of Española may not be so great for business. Nor will an eye roll from Whitney that connotes anything more than mild annoyance. She wants a happy couple. A thriving couple.

But can Whitney ever return to that? Can she really live with someone who clearly gets off getting other men to fantasize about fucking his wife (as she hears him doing in the bathroom as she sits with her thoughts in their bedroom)?

This is what drives her to show Asher the cut of Green Queen she and Dougie had been working. Footage that not only shows clear tonal dissonance when it comes to the issues tackled (the land acknowledgement at the construction site and Whitney’s flubbing of the whole land easement debacle being one example) but also the way Whitney is very much done with Asher: We see her confessionals intercut with all the ways she’s long felt like he’s beneath her, like she can’t stand him, like it’s unclear why she’s even with him when she finds him so unfunny, so awkward, so cravenly into money, so not up to her own standards. It’s a bit of cruel humiliation that, instead of motivating Asher to call her out moves him closer to her.

In those final moments, as Asher desperately clings to Whitney and all but throws himself at her feet (hard to do given that she’s still sitting in Dougie’s bed where they watched the pottery footage the HGTV exec had already asked to be cut from the show), you see a man unable to let go of the one good thing that’s ever happened to him. Which, again, is a hard thing to fathom considering how cruel Whitney appears in the footage. How cold and calculating she’s been and how much disregard she has for him. But in Fielder’s hands, Asher’s desperation is emboldening. He has nothing less to lose and so he admits to being the problem. There’s no curse. It’s just him that needs improving. It’s terrifying—all the more so because you don’t know what it is that’s happening behind Whitney’s teary, terrified eyes.

And so, while we keep pondering who is Whitney behind all her conniving, manipulative stints and her performative, jokey self-aware white-savior stunts, we may be left wondering only whether there’ll be enough Emmy love thrown toward Emma Stone’s masterful cringe performance. Because The Curse works only as well as it does because its center, its “Green Queen” remains a transfixing cipher you can’t look away from.

Stray observations

• Was Whitney’s dad trying to catch a cockroach as his wife confronted their daughter about their slumlord accusations and her attendant grandstanding a bit too on the nose? Discuss.
• Of course Asher would be great at bowling. And just as intense playing it as you’d imagine. It makes sense it would play backdrop to his attempts at yet again rebranding himself as Whitney hero, standing up for himself and calling himself a whistleblower when outright being called out for being a snitch.
• Will Whitney and Cara ever have a non-awkward encounter? And, relatedly: Did Whitney drive Cara, the artist, back into working at a high-end spa as she “rethinks her life for a bit”?
• I was so happy to see so much actual footage from Flipanthropy because, boy, does it ride home the idea that this is a show in dire need of careful producing lest it become a dry, didactic affair on the one hand, or a Housewives-style knock off on the other.
• “We are good on paper” followed by “Paper beats rock” may be Asher’s most accomplished joke of the entire season. It’d be funny if it wasn’t also such a brutal tragic understanding of his own situation.

Stream The Curse now on Paramount+.