In an astonishing scene from the new Showtime series The Curse (premiering November 10), we watch as a vain and desperate married couple, Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher (Nathan Fielder) Siegel, express the full, ugly complication of their humanity. Whitney is having trouble getting a sweater off; the zipper won’t work and the garment is now stuck on her head. Asher tries to help, tugging and tugging until the sweater finally pops off and husband and wife fall backwards in different directions, breaking into the merry, romantic laughter of a sweetly private moment. 

Then, Whitney has an idea. They should try to re-create what just happened—only this time, they’ll film it. It would make them seem happier, more likable to Whitney’s Instagram followers, and if they present as a goofy, relatable couple, HGTV may pick up the pilot that the Siegels have filmed for the network. Attempts at duplicating the moment don’t go well—it’s all rather embarrassing, really—and before too long, Whitney and Asher are in a bitter, foundation-shaking argument. It’s a prolonged scene, funny and dreadfully sad, that perhaps best represents the core strengths of  The Curse.

The series was created by Fielder and Benny Safdie, the ultra cool New York actor and filmmaker behind Uncut Gems and Good Time (who also recently appeared on screen in Oppenheimer). Fielder is known for his intricately conceived pseudo-doc comedy series Nathan for You and The Rehearsal, daring and inventive and (for me, anyway) deeply unpleasant exercises in social commentary and abject awkwardness. Safdie is more of a kinetic stylist; the films he’s made with his brother, Josh, are frenzied and edgy and grim despite their gleaming. This makes Safdie and Fielder an interesting creative pair, artists with two disparate approaches that fascinatingly commingle on The Curse. It’s a bleak show, a study in bulldozing solipsism, especially of the upper-middle-class white people variety. 

Fielder and Safdie’s premise is clever. The Curse is set in Española, a dusty New Mexico town north of Santa Fe, tucked along the banks of the Rio Grande. The population is largely Native and Latino, and the town abuts tribal lands that are, as they have been since this country’s woeful founding, disputed. Whitney and Asher have parachuted in, claiming to be sensitive to those issues, to really want to uplift the community—many of it very poor—rather than replace it. But of course, the carbon neutral so-called “passive homes” that Whitney designs—mirrored cubes full of tasteful, Pinterest-ready finishings—are prohibitively expensive. The only people who can afford to buy them are not from Española. Nor can the locals really afford to shop (or are they terribly interested in shopping at) the trendy boutique and generically sleek coffee shop that the Siegels have brought into town in a witless effort to stimulate the economy. 

In our real world, a host of HGTV stars, many of them married couples, have made their names in small towns and blighted cities across America, supposedly uplifting them through the restorative magic of home design and real estate. Swirling around series like Hometown Takeover and Fixer Upper, though, are dark questions about gentrification, about the sorry gap between reality TV and reality itself. What a brilliant topic for a probing scripted TV series, one that condemns through exacting mockery. 

It’s pathetically amusing to watch Asher, so uptight and stilted and socially inept, try to Chip Gaines himself into an affable doofus for the cameras. Stone shrewdly approximates the consoling tones of a wannabe empath and do-gooder, all the smarmy concern for the plight of the underclass and the health of our planet that’s really meant to reflect well on Whitney herself. There is, in these fascinating portraits of two noxious people, some measure of genuine compassion. Whitney and Asher are perhaps more in the process of rotting than already fully rotten; maybe at some time, before the beginning of this series, they were people who really cared. But they’ve badly lost their way, and The Curse brutally delineates the havoc they wreak in trying to find it again. 

The satire here is both on-the-nose and intriguingly nuanced. While the Siegels’ show, hideously titled Fliplanthropy, doesn’t really give a shit about the lived realities of the people it claims to be helping, The Curse does—to some extent. Many of the performers playing townsfolk are real locals, and the storytelling does expand to give some consideration to the people whom Whitney and Asher are so heedlessly afflicting. 

But the show can’t entirely shake off its meta dimensions, and it’s not clear that it even wants to do that. The Curse is itself a story of wealthy white people descending on Española to address social and economic ills, bringing their own hang-ups and preoccupations. Some viewers may ultimately see Fielder and Safdie and Stone’s work as its own disservice, creating yet another concentric circle of privileged self-regard while their subjects stand on the sidelines, only to be trotted out for the camera when convenient.

The Curse is often beguiling, sharply acted and riveting in all its idiosyncratic execution—the way scenes linger for far longer than we’ve come to expect from contemporary television grammar. (On the technical side of things, John Medeski’s score is especially effective.) By other metrics, The Curse is awfully preening in its nihilism, perhaps overly assured of its knowing righteousness as it crashes through this fragile ecosystem. (And is, incidentally, crassly hung up on cheap jokes about masculinity.) Many of the threads introduced in the first third or so of the ten-episode season promise a grand convergence, a mighty reckoning. But as the series marches toward its end, we get the sad sense that maybe Fielder and Safdie don’t have a cohesive idea of where it’s all headed, how everything is interconnected. 

The title of the series refers to a hex, real or imagined, placed on Asher after he does something comically despicable to a little girl, Nala (Hikmah Warsame), who is selling sodas in the parking lot outside the Siegels’ offices. He gives her $100 on camera, but when the camera stops rolling, he asks for it back. 

This small child curses Asher in return, and a cloud of doom settles over his life (and, by extension, Whitney’s). His marriage fractures, his creative endeavor becomes ever more compromised. Whitney is cursed in her own way: she was born the child of slum lords, cruel owners of affordable housing played by Corbin Bernsen and Constance Shulman. Sure, Whitney borrowed money from these pitiless bourgies to get her project started, but she’s not connected to them, she swears. These original sins gradually come to claim the Siegels, as, the series might argue, they should claim all people who so obtusely, greedily make their way through the world. 

Whether The Curse renders that moral judgment smugly or incisively—or both!—is the great quandary of the series. In its early episodes, the show hits its targets with confident precision—it’s acidly funny and savagely heartbreaking. But eventually, all that sardonic miserablism gets the better of the show. Safdie and Fielder wander further into abstraction, suggesting that they’re maybe not taking things as seriously as they should be. The Curse carefully recognizes a fine line only to recklessly flout it later. The trouble is, I still don’t know if that was the whole point all along.