A handful of people are watching the best show on TV. The Curse, streaming on Paramount+ in the UK and Showtime in the US, is a surrealist horror comedy about a pair of grinning, performatively right-on sociopaths who present a home renovation series and may or may not have been hexed by a little girl. It is eerie, funny and almost pathologically cringe-inducing. It’s also a rare foray into television by Oscar-winner Emma Stone. So why have you (maybe) never heard of it?
I thought about The Curse and the universal bifurcation of TV viewing while reading David Chase bemoan the state of the industry this weekend. Back in 1999, Chase created The Sopranos, less a show than a sprawling art piece about sex, violence and the decline of modern civilisation. It didn’t necessarily transform the quality of television as a whole (The Simpsons, Buffy. The X-Files, Seinfeld, Sex and the City and Twin Peaks all pre-dated it), but it did shift how the world seemed to talk about TV. It turned television into a space that even the most highfalutin of observers had to take seriously, inspiring a panoply of equally exciting and ambitious kinds of long-form storytelling: The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Succession, 24, Girls, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, and so on.
