Emma Stone and Nathan Fielder play a cute couple out to gentrify a little town for their house flipping TV show, but what happens when reality takes a wrecking ball to home reno?
Newlyweds Whitney Siegel (Emma Stone: Easy A, Zombieland, Double Tap) and husband Asher Stone (Nathan Fielder, executive producer of How To With John Wilson S1-3) have graced the working class New Mexico town of Española with their presence. They’re there with a production team to film their glossy new home improvement show, Flipranthopy, hoping to get picked up by the HGTV Network. Their pitch? They’ll buy up rundown homes and make them over to be eco-friendly. They’ll then gift the buildings to chosen members of the community to rent at a pre-flip rental price. It’s a win for everyone, right? Hmmm. Well, the building inspector has some notes.
Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone
While Flipranthopy seems to have solid foundations, what it’s really built on is Whitney’s determination to be seen as a good person who’s doing the right thing at all times, along with a hearty dollop of white guilt. Flipranthopy is secretly being bankrolled by Whitney’s parents – slumlord developers who evict struggling tenants so they can profit off their properties. A key feature of Whitney’s buildings is their mirrored exteriors, which hints at the whole show being a vanity project … and a ripoff of a famous artist’s work.
Asher, on the other hand, hasn’t fully bought into Whitney’s grand ideas. And when Flipranthopy producer Dougie (Benny Safdie) senses the foundations shifting, he starts pushing his own agenda. What he captures on camera ignites a power struggle between the newlyweds, creating a distorted vision of them and their project. Dougie is hoping to make some peak, car-crash viewing, and we’re here for it.
Binge The Curse Season 1 on Showmax now.
Flipping flops
Seen from our humble hovels, house-flipping shows offer the ultimate feel-good binge indulgence. Whether it’s a happy couple renovating a castle in the French countryside, a cute couple making over vintage houses, a mother and daughter turning tear-down wrecks into liveable homes again, or two prankster brothers with a luxury touch, home reno hits the dopamine button like a sledgehammer going through a non-load bearing wall. Just don’t zoom in too closely.
The Curse draws on a wealth of real-life rumours and truths about what really goes on behind the curtain in many home flipping and reno shows. See Asher and Whitney reeling from the brutal focus group feedback they receive as hosts like a derisive, “Be hot, or be funny.” Watch people wilt as they have to re-shoot a “spontaneous” reaction six times. And squirm as production struggles to find TV-friendly home buyers who live up to Whitney’s ideals – or diplomatic ways of saying that no uggos or bigots are allowed.
Perhaps the Flipanthropy team should have studied what can go wrong in real life.
The host gets roasted – and more real-life reno show scandals
Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone
Whitney and Asher have to compromise their values when they run into budget problems, which Orlando Soria, creator and host of real-life home reno show Build Me Up, could have told them about. In 2022, Orlando posted an unvarnished look at home reno TV in an essay on his website. Among the issues he raised were that the production deadlines of his 2020 show were immovable even when COVID shut down the building industry. He called his budget “unworkably small” and noted that he was paid per episode, so the longer past the original shooting schedule the project took (thanks, COVID) the less he effectively got paid. This led to him earning just $11 per hour (below the minimum wage of $12,50 for the area). He couldn’t even use Build Me Up to score sponsors or brand collaborations later, since it got moved to a midnight slot after just three episodes aired. His crew, thankfully, were paid a weekly rate.
Uncoupling
Being on TV can expose the cracks in a marriage. Reno fans have had popcorn at the ready ever since Flip or Flop hosts Tarek and Christina El Moussa went into marriage meltdown. Flip or Flop had it all, from increasingly barbed on-screen bickering, to gossip site TMZ reporting on a police call-out to their real-life home involving Tarek running off into the wild with a gun. The El Moussas announced their separation in 2016 and divorced in 2018, but kept co-hosting the show until 2022 – even as they found eerily similar-looking romantic partners. Their rivalry spilled over into the show in 2021 when, during filming, Tarek compared Christina unfavourably with his then-fiancee, Selling Sunset real estate star Heather Rae Young, called her a “washed up loser”, and told her that he enjoyed watching her fail.
Flip or Flop is not the only reno show out there wrecking romance. The UK’s long-running series Grand Designs has seen so many couples split during their home renovations that divorce has become square on viewers’ unofficial bingo card of predictable events.
Dubious design
Benny Safdie and Emma Stone
Some shows are notorious for letting designers loose like a poorly financed goblin horde who’ll paint only the parts of doors and walls that will be visible on camera. There have even been reports of curtains stapled to walls in a desperate effort to get them up in time for the “big reveal”. And it’s a case of “designer knows best”, until you have to clean up the mess.
Fans still talk about the Changing Rooms disaster in which designer Linda Barker’s “bright” idea to display a lifetime collection of vintage china teapots on ceiling-anchored floating display shelves came a (predictable) cropper when they overloaded it, smashing the entire collection to smithereens. And one contractor revealed that he knew what was coming after homeowners picked Moroccan tile for their floors and the reno show host decided the tiles would look better without grout. Filming wrapped, and he was soon called back to replace all the dangerously chipped tile with something boring and serviceable …with grout this time.
Unreal reality
The Curse plays up the fact that reno and flipping shows are out there to sell that feel-good story, no matter what. But what you see is not necessarily what you get. For example, clients on reno show Fixer Upper don’t get to keep the furniture in their remodelled homes. They do, however, have the option of buying it from the producers’ highly profitable design store. And several Fixer Upper clients whose stories touched viewers – with tales of forever homes getting the loving makeover of a lifetime – have since posted their remodelled houses on Airbnb and other short-term rental sites. But the biggest liars might be house-hunting shows. From Fixer Upper itself to the original House Hunters and Beachfront Bargain Hunt, to be on these shows at all, the supposed clients have to have already closed on a property. And the other options might not even be on the market. One “client” revealed that she asked her friends to stage their houses as if they were for sale when the show was in a pinch. As Orlando noted, time is money in TV production, and that is at the root of most shows’ problems.
The quick turnaround trap
We love the dream that you can take a house from dump to dreamy in just a week, all for the low, low price of couch change. The secret to making it happen? Drastically cutting corners!
Go ahead and paint that window shut, nobody will notice on TV.
In its early days, Extreme Makeover became notorious for how tight timelines impacted building quality. In one case, a crew of volunteers and contractors remodelled an entire house in just one week in the dead of winter during freezing rainy conditions, leading to endless trouble for the owner – who was on the show in the first place because they could not afford to remodel.
But be warned, cutting corners could see you in court. The property flippers behind Windy City Rehab got slapped by the City of Chicago for ignoring safety codes, skipping inspections, and working without clearing the legal paperwork necessary for making changes to properties. This isn’t just “fussy” bureaucracy. The codes exist to protect both workers and homeowners. In 2018 the Environmental Protection Agency fined one reno show’s parent company for bypassing critical health and safety protocols for dealing with lead paint contamination while working on at least 36 vintage buildings. Apparently, crews weren’t even told they were being exposed to lead paint residue. You can’t slap a coat of fresh paint over irreversible brain and nervous system damage.
From lead paint to toxic mould, Whitney and Asher will be lucky if the worst that happens is that they get cursed. Binge The Curse Season 1 on Showmax now
