Sometimes, you really do feel they’ve made a show just for you. I think this is what the hyper-concept of “fandom” (which has receded a little in the last couple of years, have you noticed? You’re allowed to post that you don’t think Marvel is important without a teenager sending a bullet to your home address now) was really all about: millions, almost billions of people felt that, for example, Robert Downey Jr’s portrayal of Iron Man was just for them, and clutched it close to their chest like a rosary. They were all wrong, of course – no single film or TV show has ever been made without producers deciding there was enough of an audience to throw a million or two pounds at it – but it’s always nice to think that they are making culture just for you. Except for The Curse (Paramount+, from Saturday), which they have actually made just for me.
Let’s start with Nathan. Nathan Fielder, who elegantly pivoted from being a Comedy Central late-night cult-following demi-prankster to TV’s artist-in-chief last year with The Rehearsal, writes and stars and directs. I was always going to watch that happen. Then you’ve got Uncut Gems creator Benny Safdie playing a big slimy freak: I am never going to not watch that. Emma Stone is in there, continuing to be our generation’s finest mouth actor – she really can show a whole range of emotion just with a tight fake smile or a bulge of the eyes – and here she is on the same form that makes me rewatch Maniac every couple of years or, you know, won her an Oscar that time. And then it’s got an A24 production sheen – long gloopy scenes, camera angles the likes of which you have never seen before (you often get the truly troubling experience of feeling like a Peeping Tom when you watch this – the camera is poked through barely open windows, it watches them across galleries, it’s one table over from them at a restaurant – the direction is stalkerish) and a touch of 2023’s trendiest story engine, “magical realism”. Again: they made this in a lab for me. You can all watch it! But know it is for me.
