In the Flesh: The Curse s1e03 'Questa Lane'

The idea of goodness as a trait is as comforting as it is elusive and ever-changing. Asher (Nathan Fielder) and Whitney (Emma Stone) congratulate themselves for getting Fernando (Christopher Calderon) a job as a barista at a coffee shop hoping for an endorsement deal with the couple’s prospective HGTV series, then congratulate themselves again for hiring the same guy to act as a night watchman when the coffee joint slimily closes down pending a final decision on whether or not the show will go to series. Asher congratulates himself on giving Nala (Hikmah Warsame) a hundred dollars for the camera, then for giving the same hundred dollars to another unrelated woman after taking it back once the cameras stopped rolling, and then for giving it to Nala and her family again after accidentally making himself their slumlord by purchasing a property he believed to be vacant. In the act, to protect his wife’s view of his goodness, he lies about earlier lies, insinuating that father Abshir (Barkhad Abdi) and his daughters may have lied to extort him.To people like the Siegels, goodness is a performance you can’t ever let up on, and others perceiving you as anything else, no matter how accurately, only means you have to act harder.

Throughout the episode the Siegels struggle in their own ways with the emotional fallout of watching an audience reaction tape for their show’s test footage, but the show-stopping sequence comes during a completely unrehearsed moment. As Asher attempts to pull off Whitney’s sweater, the zipper of which has jammed, the two playfully banter and fall apart laughing as it finally comes free. They’re awkward, unlikeable people, but it’s a surprisingly genuine moment, until Whitney realizes they can use it to appear more likable to their audience. “Let’s just do it again,” she says, alive with manic energy as she gets her phone and logs into her Instagram account. Here’s a chance to recast Asher as sympathetic, to give people the right truth about the Siegels, not the one the world around them reflects through their every act of covetous slumlord sliminess. The reenactment, though, is one lie too many, and in moments the couple are having perhaps the most new money Californian fight ever committed to the screen, a grotesque farrago of language clearly gleaned from couples counseling and employed like magic spells to shift blame and evade responsibility. “I said the words, and you’re not doing it!” an increasingly hysterical Asher babbles.

It’s the couple’s interactions with Abshir and his daughters, though, that give the episode its undeniable bite. We open with Nala and her older sister Hani (Dahabo Ahmed), both of them incidentally delivering astonishingly confident performances for actors of any age, watching in terror as an unknown intruder drills the lock on the apartment they’re squatting in. Asher emerges like the world’s least charismatic slasher villain and winds up getting yanked into a chokehold by a concerned neighbor, whose unforced decency and kindness toward the girls feels like a slap in the face after so much moral rot. Trapped by his own guilt and insecurities about public perception, Asher spirals into acting as though letting Abshir’s family remain in his newly-acquired property rent-free is of course the only thing he’d consider, but beyond his and Whitney’s nauseating tone-deafness and condescension toward their tenants, a superstitious edge creeps into the couple’s relations with the other family. “I took the chicken from his dinner,” says Nala, browsing her phone, as she explains the curse she laid on Asher in the series premiere. Unable to indulge in his poorly repressed racist impulses, Asher instead turns to paranoia for relief. It’s more tolerable to him to assume a seven-year-old wields Satanic power than it is to accept that he did something rotten and it’s eating at his conscience. Remarkable television.