‘The Curse’ Kicks Off With Nathan Fielder’s Micropenis

There is a trend that has been going around on social media that has been peeving me for months. The popular phrase goes something along the lines of “golden retriever girlfriend, black cat boyfriend,” or vice versa, depending on the couple. The gist of it is that one partner is bubbly and sweet, while the other is dark and quiet. I can’t put my finger on why it bugs me so much. Then along came The Curse, which perfectly illustrates why that dynamic should be sending a shiver down all of our spines.

Nathan Fielder, the king of cringe comedy, teams up with Oscar winner Emma Stone to recreate that dynamic in The Curse, Showtime’s wacky new series. This married couple is the embodiment of the black cat BF and golden retriever GF, illustrated by their outfits in the series premiere: Asher (Fielder) sports an all-black fit, grimacing while arguing with a news anchor, while Whitney (Stone) smiles in a knit adorned with a rainbow graphic. While Asher causes chaos, Whitney smiles it all away. Welcome to the Siegel family, and welcome to The Curse.

Asher and Whitney are developing a possible HGTV show about flipping houses and battling gentrification—two opposing forces—in Española, New Mexico. While Whitney builds “passive homes,” houses that use the same amount of energy that they are able to produce, the two-person team also works to find employment for local Española residents, to keep them from being displaced by these housing developments. For example, in the opening scene of Episode 1, Whitney and Asher help an unemployed resident get a job at a coffee shop, so that he can pay for his mother’s cancer treatments.

It sounds great, but it’s a fishy scheme, made even fishier by the fact that Dougie (Benny Safdie) is trying to insert himself into the process with TV cameras the entire time. Informing the local about his new job isn’t buzzy enough. Dougie thinks the poor guy’s sickly mother should also appear crying beside him, so he pours water down her face and blows menthol into her eyes to make the scene more dramatic. Whitney is annoyed by these gimmicks, but Dougie and Asher are longtime friends, so Asher allows Dougie’s antics to continue on.

Like HBO’s classic comedy The Comeback, we also get to see cuts of the potential show-within-a-show, Flipanthropy. We see Whitney showing off her passive homes, sold to older white people, while she and Asher also open up coffee shops to hire more locals. Watching it back, Dougie thinks this version of the show is boring. He wants Asher and Whitney to fight on-camera, suggesting that Asher say something to Whitney in a scene like, “You’re so uptight.”

Asher rejects these proposals. Instead, he makes the show—theirs and The Curse—more interesting by blowing up at a journalist interviewing a pair about Flipanthropy. (Every time I repeat this word in my head, it sounds weirder and weirder. Try saying it seven times fast.) The on-camera interview starts off well, as Asher and Whitney introduce themselves and explain that they’ve been married for just a year. They’re also afraid of “the g-word”—gentrification. “We firmly believe gentrification doesn’t have to be a game of winners and losers,” Asher explains. He says this over and over again in the pilot: There are only winners in Flipanthropy.

But there are some losers in The Curse. Asher, for one, is a big, cringy, uncool loser—in that classic, hilarious Fielder way. In a different sense, so are the mistreated residents of the mysterious Bookends building in Española, which happens to be owned by Whitney’s parents. When the journalist asks Whitney to explain why she’s making Flipanthropy while her parents, “slumlords,” evict economically disadvantaged residents from their building, all Whitney can do is bare her teeth with a nightmarish smile. Asher protects his wife by yelling at the journalist, prodding her about her family, demanding she stop asking about Whitney’s parents, and causing an overall scene over a question that only warranted something along the lines of, “No comment.”

On the way back to Dougie’s hotel to edit the footage, Asher solemnly requests to stop at the local broadcast news station to request that the journalist deletes her footage. Dougie tells him to call the journalist instead; she tells Asher to meet her at Subway in an hour. Their chat would be great to include in the show, Dougie argues, but Asher isn’t having it. In a secret ploy to set Asher up with a microphone ahead of his meeting, Dougie asks to film Asher donating $20 to a girl selling cans of Sprite on the street—it’ll make him look good on the show.

Asher obliges, but he only has a $100 bill in his wallet. He gives the girl the cash, she celebrates, and once the take is done, Asher trots back to her. Asher rips the bill out of the girl’s tiny fingers, though she tries to fight back. “I curse you!” she shouts, after he refuses to return the $100. With that, The Curse is born. Asher tries to uncurse himself by running to the ATM to give the girl and her dad (Barkhad Abdi) a $20 bill instead, but by the time he returns, the family has vanished.

This shot is all for nothing, too. When Asher enters the Subway, Dougie loses connection with his mic. Luckily, we’re not watching the edited Flipanthropy, so we get the full convo. Asher begs and begs and begs this journalist not to air the interview: “We are good people. I swear to fucking god, we are really good.” Most good people often say this. When she won’t budge, Asher resorts to offering up information about a casino, his former place of employment, about how its owners encouraged unhealthy gambling addictions. With a sigh, the journalist agrees to hold the interview for a few days until Asher can give her concrete evidence of this claim.

Later, at dinner with her parents, Whitney’s father slides one tiny carrot onto her plate. “That’s not funny,” she whispers, giggling. Why? Cut to: a shot of a micropenis peeing. It belongs to Asher.

It’s a shocking moment, although not immediately played for laughs—later on, though, The Curse finds a way to bring hilarity into the equation. Whitney’s father confronts Asher about his micropenis, saying he ought to have a sense of humor about it. Dad brings Asher out into his tomato patch to give him a metaphor: Cherry tomatoes and heirloom tomatoes taste the same on a sandwich. One is smaller, but it doesn’t matter. Then, Whitney’s dad pees on his tomatoes to water them (???) and shows Asher his own micropenis (?????). “We’re the cherry tomato boys,” Asher’s father-in-law says. I’ll never eat a cherry tomato again.

“How does this affect Whitney and Asher’s sex life?” you may wonder. The Curse doesn’t leave much to imagination on that front, cutting almost immediately to a sex scene between Whitney and Steven. Steven? Oh, that’s the name of her vibrator, which Asher presses between her thighs as the two engage in a kind of intercourse I’ve never seen on-screen before. The folks who debate whether or not sex scenes are necessary surely will have something to say about this. I’d say it’s pertinent to understand the power dynamic between the seemingly submissive Whitney and Asher, who somehow managed to bag his lovely wife. If you stop recoiling, maybe you’ll get a laugh out of this scene, too.

Back to Flipanthropy—while these two don’t seem to be having a child anytime soon, the show, instead, is their baby. Dougie really wants to make a show that has a bit of an edge, whereas Whitney and Asher want the show to be wholly good for the world. To convince the couple they need to compromise, Dougie puts on a trailer for a show he’s currently trying to sell: Love to the Third Degree, a reality competition like Love Is Blind where a handful of women try to date a man before seeing his face. The twist, though, is that this man had his face disfigured in a horrific apartment fire. Frankly, I’d rather watch Love to the Third Degree than The Curse. Alas, I’ll settle for The Curse, which is almost as great as this fake dating show would be.

While she’s alone with Dougie, recording voiceover, Whitney sees a clip of Asher being cursed by the young girl and—at nearly midnight—demands that he find her and return the $100. Asher obliges, but when he can’t find her or her family, he instead gives the bill away to two random people. He then returns with a lie that he found the little girl. The curse is still in play; Asher (or “Incher,” as Dougie teasingly calls him) still needs to pay for his mistake. While we wait for more hysterical terribleness, I’ll be spending the next week trying to wipe the wince off my face. But maybe I’m cursed, too.