The Auteurs of Discomfort

About halfway through the 10th and final episode of Showtime’s The Curse, the laws of physics spontaneously change. Without warning or explanation, Asher (Nathan Fielder) is sucked up off the ground by a sudden force apparently trying to eject him from the earth’s atmosphere; simultaneously, his wife Whitney (Emma Stone) goes into labor. The last half-hour cuts between confused firefighters trying to coax a terrified Asher to let go of the tree branch he’s clinging to for dear life—they’ve done this before, they assure him, for “tons of bears”—and surprisingly graphic scenes from Whitney’s C-section delivery. Before this point, The Curse hewed closely to reality—often too close for comfort. The series followed Asher and Whitney Siegel, would-be reality stars on the HGTV network, in their efforts to transform a small New Mexico city into a gentrified eco-haven. The series’ dramatic and unexplained slip from the couple’s believably absurd real estate ambitions into all-out fantasy is surely one of the most chaotic moments in television history, right up there with Josie Packard’s transformation into a drawer knob in the final episode of the original Twin Peaks.