What is Dougie's Deal on 'The Curse'?

The Curse, an elaborately uncomfortable satire about home renovation shows in the mold of HGTV currently streaming on Paramount+ with Showtime, is a deeply strange show with some fascinatingly weird characters. Each episode, we watch our legally distinct Chip and Joanna Gaines Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher (Nathan Fielder) Siegel move through the town of Española, New Mexico inflicting their neuroses on co-workers and locals alike as they try to bring their new show Fliplanthropy into being.

Whitney designs mirror-clad passive homes that she will have you know are NOT shamelessly ripping off of Doug Aitken and her husband Asher covers contracts and homes to flip with what can only be described as an enormous void where social graces would be found in most people. Then there’s their producer Dougie Schecter (Benny Safdie), the member of their team with experience in reality TV and a friendship with Asher. Dougie acts as a helper and occasional antagonist as he pushes Fliplanthropy away from being the educational and progressive fantasy of Whitney’s dreams and toward being a more stereotypical series with lots of conflict and false buyers. While everyone’s characters are fabulously deranged parfaits of myopia and privilege, Dougie sticks out as the biggest mystery.

Whitney and Asher, as fascinating as they are to watch, have recognizable character games at play. Whitney is always thinking about appearance and optics and is heavily invested in the sort of progressive facade that most practitioners of White Feminism adopt. She traffics in the aesthetics and gestures of values, but not quite those values themselves. Asher is the definition of charmless: he’s a liar who’s terrible at telling lies, he’s a joker who’s terrible at telling jokes, and he’s easily the worst of the three leads at talking to other people. He ping-pongs between Whitney and Dougie, too gormless to stand up to either one of them, forever a gawky sidekick. Dougie’s game is much harder to pin down, like a more stubbornly unknowable I Think You Should Leave character.

At first, Dougie appears to be a garden-variety sleazeball, and that’s certainly one layer to him. The show opens with a scene in which he uses a menthol stick and a dropper to induce an old woman with cancer to cry on camera, so there is little doubt where Dougie’s focus is. He and his crew press against the Siegel’s boundaries: they film when they’ve been asked not to, they try to record audio when the Siegels think the mics are off, they try to manipulate moments like prompting Asher to give money to a little girl in a grocery store parking lot.

It would be very easy to write Dougie off as an Industry Ghoul type character, one with a cartoonish tolerance (if not outright hunger) for the slimier ways of the entertainment industry. Unexpected wrinkles form in Dougie as a character when we join him during an excruciatingly uncomfortable date with a woman named Laura. He tells a story about his wife, who died in a car accident while Dougie was driving drunk. Except, Dougie is adamant that his drinking wasn’t to blame for the accident because it was the other driver who crashed into them, not the other way around. Laura, a person who seems a bit off herself, asks him with casual frankness if he might’ve been able to drive more defensively and avert the accident that killed his wife. Dougie admits that he thinks about it every day. Later when Dougie is driving Laura home from the bar, we see him begin to realize just how drunk he really is. Using a breathalyzer from the glove compartment, Dougie blows a .10, far too drunk to be safe on the road. When he pulls over on the side of the highway and leaves the car behind to walk Laura home, she tells him that she’s thankful he pulled over, noting that not every guy would’ve done the same. In another episode, Dougie wakes in the New Mexican desert and searches for car keys he buried under a tree so that he can return the vehicle he borrowed from a teen that he bought beer for in exchange. He marginally defends himself to the teen’s mother as if what he did was a gift.

So far, it’s not a portrait of Dougie as much as it’s a moody collage evoking Dougie. He carries an energy that’s both detached and disaffected but also achingly sad. Who is this man, some parts tragic, some parts lonely, and others scummy? We may never get a full picture of Dougie and instead be drip-fed episodes of this man’s dysfunction. Beyond a human containing many contradictions, who is Dougie? Is he a wounded man who buried himself in soul-shredding reality TV production to become someone who wouldn’t feel the pain as much? Has he always been a hard-drinking chaos agent with a stoner smile? It’s clear that Dougie doesn’t care much about Whitney’s high-minded goals, but does he care about Asher as a friend? And what are Dougie’s goals? Does he want the show to succeed? Does he really want to keep producing? Is he hoping to party himself into an early grave like a Leaving Las Vegas type thing?

Much of the pleasure of The Curse is found in observing the characters as they careen from one gaffe to another, putting on brittle performances of virtue, of confidence, of humor. Whitney and Asher can be relied upon to be clueless gentrifiers bouncing their privilege off the less fortunate of Española. Dougie Schecter can be relied upon for chaos: you never know which shade of him you’re bound to get. I can’t wait to see where this strange sleazeball goes and what he’ll do next.