‘The Curse’s Nathan Fielder On Infusing Reality Into The Satirical Show-Within-A-Show — Contenders TV

deadline.com:

As the star, co-creator, executive producer, writer and director of Showtime’s dark comedy series The Curse, Nathan Fielder admitted he and his collaborator Benny Safdie were committed to infusing the show’s satirical take on an unscripted HGTV home-flipping series with as much a sense of reality – or faux reality – as possible that he didn’t realize some of the crew were left wondering how much of the show they were working itself on was actually real.

During Deadline’s Contenders TV panel Sunday, Fielder learned from production designer Katie Byron that she and many of the crew had begun to suspect that the rug was going to be pulled out from under them at any moment. “There was a lot of meta stuff happening in the show where we were all convinced that it was a show-within-a-show-within-a-show,” said Byron. “We actually were waiting to find out that it was.” “Oh really?

Oh my God!” replied a surprised, bemused Fielder. “It seems like a terrible environment to work in. I’m sorry!” Fielder explained that the dedication to a verite style sprang from the show’s basic premise. “We had this idea of when someone says something to you, how real does it become?

And is it the outside world is doing things or is it what’s going on in your own head?” he explained. “And so that was the jumping off point, I think, for the show to have something like that where the viewer is unsure if something’s going on or it’s just the characters building their own downfall.” “With these home flippers and these shows, you see these people come into a community often and impose their will on it and then leave,” said Fielder. “And so we were sort of conscious, too, that we as filmmakers are coming into this community and, even though it’s