Nathan Fielder drew a striking connection between real life and The Curse while explaining why the show unsettles so many people: unlike a TV scene, reality never just cuts away. The silence stays, and everyone has to live in it.
“In some way, nothing ends with a cut when you’re in real life,” he said at an audience Q&A about the series. “You sometimes, there’s nothing else to say, and everyone has subtext of things they’re not saying to each other. And that feels like normal.”
When the word “cringey” came up, Fielder laid out what he and co-creator Benny Safdie were really chasing: “We were just basically, we love it when characters are in scenes, and they’re not saying what they’re actually feeling, and maybe communicating it some other way.”
Safdie pushed back on the discomfort label in a December 22, 2023 interview, saying “We’re not out there to make people feel uncomfortable.” Fielder summed up their guiding principle in an email published that same day as “core honesty.”