‘The Curse’ Plays a Game of Chicken With a Pile of Chicken
Finally, The Curse has answered my important question from last week: “Is the show called Flipanthropy or Fliplanthropy?! In a preview of Asher (Nathan Fielder) and Whitney’s (Emma Stone) HGTV show, the title card rolls: Fliplanthropy. Let this serve as a correction for all of our previous mentions of Flipanthropy. The press notes provided to reporters called the fictional series Flipanthropy, so one would see how we’d get mixed up. But it doesn’t matter—Fliplanthropy might not be Fliplanthropy all that much longer, anyways.
The rough cut follows Janice (Aliyah Lee) and Pascal (Alexander Adrian Gibson), two normal people hired as actors pretending to be purchasing one of Whitney’s passive homes. They get the keys to the house, and then begin “integrating themselves” into the local community. Look how happy they are, removing graffiti and chatting about the weather with neighbors!
As Whitney and Dougie (Benny Safdie) sit watching the rough cut of this bland episode, Whitney offers some criticism. “Something feels off. It’s edited well, but…” She trails off, before continuing: “It just feels lifeless, or something. Is this really the best version of what we shot?” Dougie admits to her that the show doesn’t work because it’s frictionless, and offers a new angle he’s been trying to shoot this entire time: What if the show is actually about how much Whitney hates Asher?