Forget Gladiators and Traitors, the best TV show of 2024 is The Curse

Less than three weeks in, 2024 has already been a stand-out year for television. First ITV’s Mr Bates vs The Post Office helped set the political agenda with its portrayal of the scandal now sending shockwaves through Westminster and Tokyo.

Then Luke ‘The Nuke’ Littler somehow convinced the nation we’re all darts fans with his kebab-munching run to the final of the sport’s World Championship. Next came the return of Saturday night staple Gladiators, with six million tuning in to watch a bunch of muscle-bound men and women with names like ‘Viper’ and ‘Nitro’ attempt to pulverise members of the public.

And if that wasn’t enough we got an Emmys awards night that served as a reminder of what a great year 2023 was for quality TV. The peerless Succession took home the lion’s share of the awards, including entirely deserved wins for Kieran Culkin and Sarah Snook (best actor and actress) and Jesse Armstrong, who picked up best writer. Other big winners included Ali Wong’s deliciously dark revenge comedy Beef and Jeremy Allen’s superb kitchen drama The Bear.

But I’m not here to talk about any of those – I’m here to talk about a television event that passed by largely unnoticed: the finale of the first truly brilliant TV show of 2024, one that’s sure to go down as a cult favourite, to be picked apart and analysed anew for decades to come. I’m talking about The Curse.

Where to start… The Curse is the latest venture from Nathan Fielder, the man who once created “poo flavour ice cream” as a PR stunt for a struggling business in his show Nathan For You. Fielder specialises in weaponising his natural awkwardness, while at the same time deconstructing the building blocks of reality TV.

He took this concept to its absurd and sublime logical conclusion in 2022 docu-drama The Rehearsal, which saw him create an entire parallel reality, with actors playing stage-managed versions of his guests, their friends, their colleagues, and even Fielder’s own family.

These shows are required reading for The Curse, Fielder’s first show that abandons the veneer of reality TV (always a slippery concept in his work), written alongside Uncut Gems director and Oppenheimer actor Benny Safdie. It stars Fielder and Emma Stone as a pair of white saviour landlords peddling eco homes in a poor American town. Their ‘journey’ is documented by a TV crew creating a reality show about them.

Touching on issues including middle class racism, asynchronous relationships, body shame, greenwashing and nepotism, it’s excruciating to watch, an anxiety dream played out over 10 hour-long episodes. It’s deliberately traumatic, unnaturally slow, the kind of series you’ll view from between your fingers as you will with all your being that these characters would stop being so utterly, irredeemably terrible for just five minutes.

Stone is fantastic, capturing the manic, frazzled energy of a woman so determined to be seen as ‘good’ that she’s willing to bulldoze whoever stands in her way, especially her hapless husband.

And boy does it Go To Some Places. The final episode is such a strange, experimental episode of TV it feels like it belongs in a gallery. The Curse does things that no other TV show is even attempting, foregoing the usual requirement to entertain and instead staying true to its terrible, compulsive vision.

Why would anyone put themselves through such an ordeal? It’s a question I asked myself during the weekly panic attack The Curse threatened to induce. But I haven’t stopped trying to unpack its strange motivations, solve its esoteric riddles, and figure out what makes it tick.

The fact it’s only streaming on Paramount+ in the UK means hardly anyone has seen it, and that’s a huge shame – £7 to stream one of the best TV shows in recent memory is an absolute steal.