Everyone will get to see who you really are.

The Curse — 3.5/5

Nathan Fielder is possibly my favorite artist, as annoying as that makes both him and me sound. And so, I give him the benefit of the doubt. There are large portions of The Curse's first nine episodes that I both enjoyed and also zoned out and played on my phone throughout. Ah, yes, it's awkward, I get it, call me when the next scene comes. Get to the conclusion, I wished. And boy, that conclusion, huh. At least as far as that first nine episodes goes—and this being Fielder's first scripted show—I think they revealed something about his overall artistic thesis statement. It's not about him being awkward, it's not about the people he interacts with being cringey, it's about the things we will do or say once we are made uncomfortable. Discomfort reveals us. We're losers, we're idiots, we're unfunny, we're the worst parts of ourselves because we are unsettled. Throughout, Whitney and Asher are revealed to be shitty people—far past the point of us getting the joke. But then that last episode. I don't know that I've got it figured out, but I can say that for those 60 minutes, I was enraptured. For all that we knew and learned about those characters over the preceding 9 episodes, the episode made me care about them. Beyond just a 'what the fuck is going on,' which surely underpinned it, I wanted them to be close again. Stripped of everything that made sense, you saw love between them. That is also what discomfort reveals.