This post contains spoilers for this week’s episode of The Curse, which is now streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime.
The Seigels and Dougie get some very good news at the start of “Under the Big Tree.” Fliplanthropy has been picked up to series by HGTV. This is what all three of them have so badly wanted, for varying reasons. Whitney and Asher need the show to make their house-flipping business work, and Whitney also views it as an opportunity to evangelize about the causes she believes in. Dougie, meanwhile, is so profoundly lonely and bored that a chance to make a new show with a very old friend would give his life some genuine purpose and meaning for a while.
The show is technically streaming-only, rather than something being made for HGTV proper. But that’s a dubious distinction in a cord-cutting world where Whitney and Asher’s target demo likely streams everything, anyway. Yet even that subtle gap from one to the other portends bigger gaps between how each lead presents him or herself, and who they actually are.
Whitney, for instance, quickly lets HGTV exec Martha start talking her out of some of the loftier goals of Fliplanthropy. The gentrification aspects are a pure bummer, so Fernando has to be positioned as someone who needs help, rather than someone being displaced by rich white people moving into his neighborhood. And speaking of said rich white folks, it becomes clear quickly that Vic, whose purchase of one of Whitney’s passive homes was the subject of the Fliplanthropy pilot, is a racist asshole who mistrusts his brown neighbors and doesn’t even care about the carbon-neutral aspects of the house. Whitney is indignant, but she also can’t do anything about him getting rid of the expensive, climate-friendly induction stove their contractor installed(*). And for all of Whitney’s frustration with Vic, she herself winds up not being crazy about the job Fernando is doing at the strip mall — or, at least, about Fernando’s insistence on bringing a gun to work. Throughout, you get the sense that she thought she could send this guy off to his job at the coffee shop and never have to talk to — or even think about — him again, and instead he keeps sticking around and making her uncomfortable.
(*) This leads to yet another inept Asher Seigel heist sequence. And at least he managed to break into the casino computer last time, whereas here he fails to actually secure the induction stove to reuse in another house.
Asher, meanwhile, begins spending more and more time at the Questa Lane house, ostensibly to help out Abshir and the girls. (Even though much of the help isn’t needed, like Asher bringing food to the home of a man who gets plenty of that for free through his supermarket job.) Really, though, he’s there because he can’t let go of the idea that Nala has cursed him, and clumsily keeps asking her to tell him more about tiny curses, penne with chicken, etc. Abshir has to walk a tightrope with this intrusive, creepy guy who is nonetheless letting his family live rent-free in this house, but the curse stuff crosses a line for him. It’s not out of some African superstition, like Asher assumes, but for a more pragmatic reason. As Abshir puts it, “If you put an idea in your head, it can become very real.”
Which brings us to Dougie. The episode opens with him waking up in his car in the middle of a field, with no memory of where he is or how he got there. Gradually, the pieces come back to him, and they’re no glamorous Hangover-style adventure. Instead, he got a bunch of high school kids drunk, but insisted on holding onto their car keys because of his trauma over how his wife died. He is once again trying to present himself as noble, even though he’s both gross and in denial about his own role in all of these incidents. When Asher tries to talk with him about curses, Dougie wonders if he himself was cursed, because how else could you possibly explain what happened to his wife? (Insert the “Sure, Jan” GIF, or your preferred skeptical meme of choice, right here.)
Dougie and Asher’s conversation also offers some clarity about the nature of their past relationship, and again finds one of them denying the reality of the situation. They were not actually friends, it seems, and Dougie even apologizes for bullying Asher. Asher, though, insists that he thought this was all joking around. It’s the sort of defensive posture a sad and isolated kid might have to take while the bullying is actually happening, but for him to still feel this way years later — even as Dougie is calling it what it was — speaks to a level of insecurity that has followed Asher into middle age.
Or maybe it’s just that he doesn’t understand comedy? The episode concludes with Asher attending a corporate comedy class. This is on the advice of Martha, who, like everyone who has seen Fliplanthropy or spent any time with the Seigels, can see that he needs a drastic makeover in how he presents his personality to the world. But what little we see of the class suggests that Asher has the steepest possible climb ahead of him, as he’s literally the only student who fails to make the rest of the group laugh, even though they are all clearly eager to laugh at one another’s jokes to make everyone feel better. If Asher can’t even generate a smile in that kind of friendly environment, then producing the remaining season of Fliplanthropy may not be the dream that anyone wants it to be.
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
