“Either be hot or be funny.” That’s the critique Asher gets from the focus group that HGTV presents with an early cut of Flipanthropy. If you’re going to be a sidekick, pick a lane — lover or jester. Asher needs to rip off his shirt (preferably to reveal eight-pack abs) and start hauling mirrored cladding around the construction site, or else, as one viewer helpfully suggests, he can take a comedic shower in which he shaves his armpits.
The feedback is entirely eviscerating; it’s a miracle that any couple-cum-co-hosting duo survives the focus-group process. It’s also, I think, accurate from what glimpses we’ve seen of their tedious show and the complaints we’ve heard from Dougie. Flipanthropy is a dud. Viewers don’t mind Whit (miraculously), but her sustainable houses are too esoteric to really be aspirational. And viewers may like that she engages with the “hard stuff” — gentrification, climate change, native-land rights — but the overall effect is boring, eat-your-vegetables TV. If Mrs. Siegel is the straight man, then Mr. Siegel has to be something — well, specifically, hot or funny — else. And fast.
What’s revealed in this episode is how Whitney’s vision for remaking Española is a house of cards entirely contingent on their nonexistent TV series becoming a smash hit. That’s their only marketing strategy for bringing new homebuyers to town, which in this precarious and crowded streaming market seems like the road to bankruptcy. Those cute little downtown shops that Whitney and Asher have offered free rent to — Barrier Coffee, the bougie jeans place? They’ve all turned out the lights now that production is on hiatus, because even with free rent you can’t make a profit selling $6 flat whites this far north of Santa Fe. This means the Flip can’t keep its promises to people like Fernando, the displaced New Mexico native Whit offered a steady barista job back in the pilot.
And even without the green light from HGTV, the Siegels have continued overpaying for tear-down properties on the assumption that their breakout show will generate enough buzz to improve the worth of the land. (Seriously, how many people do Whitney and Asher think make major life decisions based on home-reno TV? Flipanthropy would need to pull in Fox News numbers to fill this town with enough impulsive hipsters.) In “Questa Lane” — named for the neighborhood Whitney and Asher are hoping to populate with their basic cable audience — everything suddenly feels desperate. Either Flipanthropy makes it to air, or Whit may end up permanently recasting the sidekick role.
To calm Whitney’s fears that she’s married exactly the dull and miserly man the focus groupers see on TV, Asher starts behaving like another person. For example, when he finds out the house he bought at auction is coincidentally being squatted in by the same little girl, Nala (Hikmah Warsame), who first hexed him outside the Family Dollar, he insists the family, including father Abshir (Barkhad Abdi) and sister Hani (Dahabo Ahmed), can stay for free … indefinitely. The naturalistic performances from Warsame, Abdi, and Ahmed only underscore how stilted and affected Whitney and Asher are together, and not just when they’re filming their show. Watching Nala and Hani walk home from school, chattering about Roblox and fighting over a missing eraser, was the closest thing we’ve seen to real life on The Curse.
“And they wonder why I’m with you,” Whitney says when she learns of Asher’s generosity toward Abshir and his girls. Whitney, I wager, wonders about “they” a lot. Of course, Whitney isn’t content to just let Abshir — who has been squatting on Questa Lane since the old landlord stopped cashing the grocery-store worker’s rent checks two years ago — keep on living in peace. She needs to improve their situation, by which she always means impose herself on the situation. I’m relieved she’s not content to be a slumlord like her father, but watching TikTok on the sofa with the girls and staying over for dinner is so tacky and cloying. She looks crestfallen when she learns the hot dogs will be served in buns and not on a bed of rice. Whitney cannot abide by any evidence of assimilation. Abshir, for his part, is savvy enough not to trust his white saviors; he wants the “rent-free” part of this living arrangement written down in a contract, which Whitney assures him Asher will draw up. Whitney is more of an ideas person.
She does, while crowding in on the girls’ pre-dinner screentime, uncover the secret of Nala’s curse on Asher. Apparently so-called “tiny curses,” in which you wish your enemy’s shoelaces untied or your rival’s pencil tip broken, were a micro-trend on TikTok last month, which Whitney finds to be a relief. She’d been afraid there was real African juju cast against her and her TV show, though adorable-looking preteens who meddle in the dark arts seem plenty scary to me. Unexpectedly, it’s Asher who now fears the magick is flowing. Nala says that on the parking lot day, she wished the chicken would go missing from the hundo-snatcher’s pasta bake, which is exactly what happened to him that evening.
It’s been a long day for Asher and Whit. On top of the focus group from hell and finding out their newly purchased, supposedly vacant property is occupied by a small girl who might be a sworn enemy, they have to go see Dr. Brown, Whit’s gyno. He administers a shot that will stall the ectopic pregnancy from growing while Asher asks inane questions about whether or not fingering his wife would violate the weeks-long ban on intercourse. Perhaps just call the doctor when your wife isn’t on the medical table? Whitney is embarrassed. Maybe this is the focus group talking, but I personally think she might be looking forward to some enforced time away from Asher sexually.
By the time the Siegels arrive home, everyone is tired. Asher flicks through TikTok, hoping to learn the chickenless dinner curse is a standard issue threat all the kids are making these days. Just another coincidence. Whitney, trying to unwind for the night, finds that she’s physically stuck in her turtleneck shirt. The zip won’t unzip. She’ll need to be pulled out of it by Asher, an incident that is funny enough in the context of their dry and humorless marriage but did not immediately stand out to me as exceptional. “I wish the network could see this,” Whit suggests, kinda romantically, I suppose, if you squint.
Before her husband can unpack how depressing a sentence Whitney’s just uttered, she’s run into the closet for another turtleneck so that they can reenact the scene for her iPhone camera, this time with Whit’s blocking and line edits. This is the real them, you know? Eating hot dogs without rice with their impoverished tenants and giggling in delight over their own PG antics. Saving the world and having a laugh. She’s planning to post the reenactment video on Instagram. The network can see this!
But like most things in this life, it’s not as funny the second time around. The innuendos don’t pop; the laughter feels canned; the turtleneck does not look believably “stuck.” His mind still preoccupied with how a little girl he’d never met before made the chicken disappear from his carbonara when there’s no way she could know he was planning to order carbonara, he asks if Whitney thinks the family could have been rooting around in the couple’s garbage, scavenging for food (and learning the Siegels’ eating habits just in case they should one day all find themselves in a strip mall confrontation). Whitney says no, pointing out how insane it is to assume the family that just served them dinner is also diving in their dumpsters. Asher — and this is where things veer off the rails — says he would make the same assumptions if Abshir was a poor, white dad, which, I guess, congratulations? Whitney wonders aloud how race became a part of the conversation, and soon the couple is trapped in each other’s liberal crosshairs.
Whit accuses Asher of being racist when he insists he only misspoke. But, come to think of it, says Asher, she was the one who thought Nala was an apprentice witch doctor rather than a TikTok junkie, so really, who’s the racist now? He calls her nasty; she calls him small-minded. Whitney doesn’t stop screaming when Asher uses the couple’s therapist-designated safe word (which I think is “validate”). I repeat: She does not stop.
So when does she finally calm down? When Whitney realizes that she’s accidentally left the camera rolling from the staged turtleneck episode. The camera never lies. In fact, it’s become her conscience; be the you you’d like a focus group to watch back. Whoever you are on-camera — biting or boring — is who you are in real life. That’s what the network will see, too.
Meanwhile, Fernando — fired by the short-lived Barrier Coffee shop and recently rehired by Española Passive Homes — shows up to work the security graveyard shift at the shopping plaza Whitney and Asher own. Eight p.m. to 4 a.m. with his personal shotgun on his shoulder. Thoughtlessly or at least unwittingly, the Siegels seem to have given him a dangerous job when they promise they only meant to make things better. It’s hard to imagine his dying mother — the one Dougie pepper-sprayed to get tears for his pilot — feels better at night knowing this is how Fernando is spending the hours she’s sleeping.
But this particular kind of carelessness, so far, is Whitney’s M.O. She bounds through Española doing reckless “charity.” Saving the environment but killing the birds. Attracting new businesses no local can afford. Buying up homes and leaving them vacant in a town with a substantial unhoused population.
Of course, in this case, Whitney’s aim is to profit off the poor in order to redevelop homes for the rich in the hopes that the poor can find full-time work making their coffees one day. But it’s already easy to see how our misunderstood Robin Hood will see it when the community turns on her: No good deed goes unpunished.
