Following their most successful film to date, Uncut Gems, Josh and Benny Safdie are moving on to their next project: A Showtime TV pilot, featuring the star of Nathan For You.
According to Deadline, the show is called The Curse, and it’s a half-hour comedy that’s written by Benny Safdie and Nathan Fielder, and stars the two of them as well. The show is about a married couple who star on an HGTV show, but find their happiness threatened by a curse. Fielder will play the husband; the role of the wife is yet to be cast.
The name of the show-within-the-show is Flipanthropy, and its said to recall the story of Tarek El Moussa and Christina Anstead, who starred on the reality show Flip or Flop prior to their divorce.
The Safdies are executive producers of the show, and will direct at some point, although they’re not directing the pilot, Deadline reported.
The New York-based filmmakers, who are in their 30s, have directed six films since 2008, most of which they have co-directed. Uncut Gems, which starred Adam Sandler as a New York City jeweler engaging in an escalating series of wagers and hustles, was the brothers’ most high-profile film to date, grossing $49 million domestically and earning Sandler a Film Independent Spirit Awards for Best Actor, and themselves one for Best Director, even if the film was shut out of the Oscars.
Fielder is best known for the critically adored Comedy Central series Nathan For You, in which Fielder played a version of himself who worked as an unconventional business consultant. The series ran for four seasons, ending in late 2017, and afterward Fielder directed episodes of Sacha Baron Cohen’s show Who is America, also for Showtime. He also had a part in The Disaster Artist, as one of the actors in The Room.
On Nathan For You, Fielder often sharply satirized hare-brained business schemes, so it’s not hard to imagine him having humorous things to say about the world of house-flipping.
The Safdie brothers have not announced their next movie project. In 2017 they were attached to a remake of 48 Hrs., but that film was never made.
