Fielder and Safdie’s series about a couple filming a do-gooding property programme is as uncomfortable as television gets, and often brilliant. Its middle episodes circle the same anxieties for longer than they need to, and it asks a good deal of patience.
Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie have made a comedy about a married couple, Whitney and Asher Siegel, who are filming a house-flipping programme for television and swearing to the camera that what they are doing is not gentrification. Everyone in the town is expected to be grateful. The series is superb for long stretches, funnier than anything this unpleasant has any right to be, and it loses its way for two or three episodes in the middle before finding it again. We recommend it with that caveat, and with a warning about how it feels to sit through.
Emma Stone plays Whitney as a woman who has decided to be good and would like that noted. Her smile stays up a half-second past the point where anyone would mean it, and when the smile drops, which it does often, what is underneath is not cruelty but panic. Fielder plays Asher as a smaller man, eager, damp, keeping a private ledger of every kindness he has done. Stone is at her best in the scenes where Whitney asks someone with less money than her to approve of her and does not get it; the face keeps working after the voice has stopped. We watched several of those scenes through our fingers, and it was the working face that did it, not anything anyone said.
Maceo Bishop shoots most of it from too far away. Conversations are filmed from across a car park or through a kitchen window, on long lenses, so that we are always slightly outside them and never sure who else is watching. It makes the whole series feel like footage the Siegels’ cameras kept recording after everyone thought they had stopped. John Medeski’s score is a low, held tone on organ and synthesiser that refuses to resolve, and it runs under scenes that in any other comedy would have no music at all.
Katina Danabassis dresses Whitney in cream linen and heavy silver and Asher in polo shirts a size wrong in one direction or the other. Fielder directs some episodes, David and Nathan Zellner others, and the seams do not show.
Safdie’s Dougie Schecter is the third lead, and the one the series leans on when the Siegels become too much to bear. Safdie plays him as a man who wants footage and does not much care what it costs the people in it. Barkhad Abdi, as Abshir, gives the show its only calm. He meets the Siegels’ help and their smiles with the same flat courtesy, and the scenes in which Whitney fails to make him grateful are among the most precise things here.
The trouble is the middle. Somewhere around the sixth episode the series settles into three scenes it plays in rotation: Whitney fishing for approval from someone poorer than her, Asher fishing for approval from Whitney, Dougie fishing for footage from both. The rooms change. The scenes do not. Side threads are picked up, set down and picked up again without much moving. We were bored, and then we were cross about being bored, because the series plainly knew what it was doing and had decided our impatience was good for us. Ten episodes is two more than the material needs.
Then the last hour arrives and takes a turn we will not describe. It is the most surprised we have been by a television finale in years, and we are still not certain it is good. Set against the cringe comedy it belongs to, it is more controlled than most and more frightening, because it never once lets the audience off with a wink. Most critics have landed near where we have, though the spread is wide: one national paper found it close to unwatchable, several others called it among the best things of its year, and we understand both positions.
Watch one episode at a time. It is built to be endured in pieces, and taken in a single sitting it stops being funny and starts being punishment. Stone’s admirers should not miss it; she has rarely been asked to be this unlikeable, and she has rarely been better.
