The pilot is being directed by Ash's controlling childhood friend Dougie (Safdie), whose earlier (unsold) pilot, a sort of 'Phantom of the Opera' riff on 'The Bachelor,' in which the bachelor is a burn victim, who is masked until after the wedding. The Siegels are building more of these around town as they film a pilot for HGTV, tentatively titled 'Flipanthropy,' in which they are to be shown aiding locals they have displaced. The house they have set up is one of Whitney's invention, eco-friendly, carbon-neutral and 'invisible' - it is all mirrors on the outside, or to be precise, 'laminated with a photovoltaic profile' - and certified by Germany's Passive House Society. It's not a comedy and doesn't seem to want to be, yet many of the incidents could, with a few adjustments, launch an episode of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm.'įielder and third star Emma Stone play Asher and Whitney Siegel, not long married, who have set up house in the (real) town of Española, N.M., up the road a way from Santa Fe, where her parents (Corbin Bernsen and Constance Shulman) live.

The tone is more tragic than comic, even if it has something of the exaggerated tone and farcical situations of comedy - indeed, it reportedly started out as a half-hour sitcom before morphing into its present, darker, hour-long form. Possibly you are meant to wonder as you go, just what path you're finally on that was definitely the case with 'The Rehearsal.' At the same time, with its overarching and underlying narratives, and its cornucopia of interest - gentrification, racism, white privilege, white guilt, cultural/spiritual appropriation, performative good works, marital breakdown, karma and the doomed attempt to live authentically for a public - the enterprise as a whole can feel wobbly, loose, unfocused. Even when scenes go on long, nothing feels like filler everything has its place. The 10-episode series, which premieres Friday on Showtime, is nothing if not ambitious, and it has been clearly thought through, shot by shot it feels extraordinarily intentional. As a collaboration, it's something new for both, scripted straight through, unlike Fielder's meta social-experiment prank shows, and something of a psychological thriller, with an element of horror, but animated by Fielder's themes, subjects and, one might venture, neuroses. It was a foregone conclusion that 'The Curse,' co-created by and co-starring Nathan Fielder, from ' Nathan for You' and ' The Rehearsal,' and Benny Safdie of the film-directing Safdie Brothers, of ' Good Time' and ' Uncut Gems,' would be at least interesting.

Prank encounters scripted