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The show isn’t exactly accurate. It isn’t entirely not accurate, either.

Edie Dillman lives in the first certified passive house in New Mexico. She and her architect husband, Jonah Stanford, are founders of a company called B.Public Prefab that builds and supplies prefabricated panels for highly energy efficient homes.
So when The Curse began to air on Showtime this past fall, following an aspiring HGTV host couple Asher and Whitney Siegel, played by Canadian awkwardness spelunker and conceptual comic Nathan Fielder alongside America’s sweetheart Emma Stone, who are trying to get their show, “Flipanthropy” — during which they build and sell passive homes in Española, a town half an hour north of Santa Fe — picked up by the network, Dillman and her husband found out about it.
“I was aware the second it launched,” Dillman told me. “There’s some very obvious correlations of a husband and wife team doing passive homes in northern New Mexico, for sure. So people started texting saying, ‘are you watching this? This is horribly painful.’ They were right.”
The show plumbs new depths of discomfort for Fielder, who before this was best known for his conceptual reality shows Nathan For You and The Rehearsal. The Curse opens with a producer dabbing the eyes of an elderly woman dying of cancer with water and even blowing menthol on them to get her to cry when the Siegels offer her son a job at the upscale coffee shop they’ve brought into town. And it only gets more uncomfortable from there: Asher takes a $100 bill away from a young girl after giving it to her on camera and spills a Powerade on a former coworker in order to steal from his computer; the poor little girl’s father, meanwhile, goes through what might be the most uncomfortable chiropractor appointment of all time (some viewers thought he had died), courtesy of Whitney.
Dillman seemed good-natured about the whole thing, even acknowledging that “any press is good press” and that the show was probably the most media attention the passive house community has ever gotten.
She was also refreshingly forthright about her own position — literally. “I think it's fair to tell you, as a journalist writing about this, I'm sitting in my own home that is a certified passive house and has the plaque that is almost identical to the plaque they have in the show, so it's a little too close to home,” she said. “Be kind in your reporting.”
The Curse is not a broadside against the passive house movement, which began in Germany in the 1980s and is based on using advanced building techniques — namely lots of insulation and thick windows that eliminate “thermal bridging,” where big differences in temperature create air flows that lead to inefficient air loss — to minimize the amount of energy needed to heat and cool a home. The target of the show is more the narcissism of do-gooders, how publicly virtuous behavior can mask and enable private avarice (the couple at the center of the show have an ultimate plan to goose the value of property they own in the town; Stone’s character is also the daughter of notorious Santa Fe slum lords) and how reality TV warps everything it touches.
But the vehicle The Curse chooses for its narcissistic, selfish, and emotionally damaged protagonists is nevertheless an oddly specific one. Not only have Whitney and Asher explicitly ripped off the design of their passive homes from artist Doug Aitken, whose designs famously feature mirrored exteriors, there’s even a German character clearly based on Passive House founder Wolfgang Feist who is brought in to explain the principles of passive homes.
The show does correctly identify some of the precise anxieties of the passive house movement. Any number of FAQs and guides to passive houses address the exact issues that come up in The Curse, such as whether you can open windows and doors or how homes are cooled in hot weather.
One buyer on the show tosses out an induction stove because he wants to be able to stir-fry, while in perhaps the series’s cringiest scene, another prospective buyer couple pulls out of a deal in part because of how long it takes for their prospective home to cool when a door is opened. The male half of the couple is already sweating when he enters the house and almost immediately asks for a glass of water. While trying to air himself out, he asks if there’s enough wattage for some air conditioning units.
“The answer to that is you don’t need one,” Whitney says, explaining that because the home “functions like a thermos,” it will never go below 65 degrees Fahrenheit or above 78.
“But 78 is sweltering,” the man says, before Whitney and Asher explain that because they had opened the door, it will take five to seven hours for the temperature to adjust.
The scene, Dillman said, “was a really funny exaggeration, and what's painful is we often use the thermos analogy.”
But, she told me in a follow-up email, “I just want to say that opening doors and windows does not create hours of discomfort. My teenagers were horrified by that scene, as they have lived in a passive house for 12 years and have never experienced anything like that.”
Dillman noted that passive homes can have air conditioning and gas ranges, although for maximum carbon reduction and air quality, electrified cooking is best. The way the show depicts perfectionism, meanwhile, is “rightly satirized,” she said. Still, the idea of “a perfect home that you can't open windows and doors,” was “really damaging and inaccurate — funny, but inaccurate.”
Dillman said few of the projects her company works on actually clear the passive house certification bar. “People are interested in the benefits, but not necessarily the gold star,” she told me.
Those benefits and how they’re achieved are explained at great length in The Curse — to the point that the third main character, an unctuous reality TV producer Dougie played by Benny Safdie, just about loses it. “This shit sucks, alright,” he says. “And it’s boring — really boring. I’m watching a guy talk about air for four minutes.”
But The Curse also milks drama from some of the thornier facets of the passive house movement, especially where it intersects with politics. When the couple drops out of buying the sweltering home, Asher calls another prospective buyer, who rolls up in a pickup truck sporting a pro-cop Blue Lives Matter decal. He loves the home — other “eco” homes he’s looked at “don’t even consider” thermal bridging, and he “love[s] that they’re basically off the grid.”
Instead of accepting that sustainable building practices can be appealing to people besides liberal do-gooders, Whitney — whose own goals of getting “Flipanthropy” picked up by HGTV, increasing the value of the real estate she and her husband own, and, most importantly, getting people to like and respect her are only glancingly associated with sustainability per se — goes near-catatonic with Asher.
“I actually loved that,” Dillman said. While she acknowledged that the stereotypical buyer of a passive home is a “white, liberal, do-gooder sustainability nut,” she also recognized that the energy independence a passive house offers might just as obviously appeal across the political spectrum. “It’s where the right and left somewhat come together and really agree,” Dillman told me.
While some of the downsides of passive home construction depicted on The Curse were “super inaccurate,” Dillman said, “I think seeing the humor in it and the morality is important.”
“I mean,” she added, “it’s really terrifyingly good satire.”
Read more about climate-related home design:
The Deadly Mystery of Indoor Heat
How to Prepare Your House for a Hotter Future
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Much of California’s biggest county is now off limits to energy storage.
Residents of a tiny unincorporated community outside of Los Angeles have trounced a giant battery project in court — and in the process seem to have blocked energy storage projects in more than half of L.A. County, the biggest county in California.
A band of frustrated homeowners and businesses have for years aggressively fought a Hecate battery storage project proposed in Acton, California, a rural unincorporated community of about 7,000 residents, miles east of the L.A. metro area. As I wrote in my first feature for The Fight over a year ago, this effort was largely motivated by concerns about Acton as a high wildfire risk area. Residents worried that in the event of a large fire, a major battery installation would make an already difficult emergency response situation more dangerous. Acton leaders expressly opposed the project in deliberations before L.A. County planning officials, arguing that BESS facilities in general were not allowed under the existing zoning code in unincorporated areas.
On the other side, county officials maintained that the code was silent on battery storage as such, but said that in their view, these projects were comparable to distribution infrastructure from a land use perspective, and therefore would be allowable under the code.
Last week, the residents of Acton won, getting the courts to toss out the county’s 2021 memorandum allowing battery storage facilities in unincorporated areas – which make up more than 65% of L.A. County.
Judge Curtis Kin wrote in his October 14 ruling that “such expansive use of the interpretation runs contrary to the Zoning Code itself,” and that the “exclusion” of permission for battery storage in the code means it isn’t allowed, plain and simple.
“Consequently, respondents and real parties’ reliance on the existence of other interpretive memos and guidance by the [Planning] Director is beside the point,” Kin stated. “There is no dispute the Director has the authority to issue memos and interpretations for Zoning code provisions subject to interpretation, but, as discussed above, such authority cannot be used in such a way as to violate the provisions of the Zoning Code.”
The court also declared the Hecate project approval void and ordered the company to seek permits under the California Environmental Quality Act if it still wants to build. This will halt the project’s development for the foreseeable future. Alene Taber, the attorney representing Acton residents, told me she has received no indication from Hecate’s legal team about whether they will appeal the ruling.
Hecate declined to comment on the outcome.
Taber’s perspective is unique as a self-described “rural rights” attorney who largely represents unincorporated communities with various legal disputes. She told me this ruling demonstrates a serious risk regulators face in moving too fast for a host community, especially given rising opposition to battery storage in California. Since the Moss Landing fire, opposition to storage projects has escalated rapidly across the state – despite profound tech differences between more modern designs proposed today and the antiquated system that burned up in that incident.
I asked Taber if she thought California enacting a new law last week to beef up battery fire safety oversight could stem the tide of concerns about battery storage. In response, she railed against a separate statute giving energy companies – including battery developers – the ability to work around town ordinances and moratoria targeting their industry.
“Even though the county didn’t consider the community input — which it should’ve — the county process at least still allowed for communities to appeal the project. And they’re also at least supposed to consider what the local zoning code said,” Taber told me. “Local communities are now sidelined all together. They’re saying they don’t care what the concerns are. Where’s the consideration for how these projects are now being sited in high fire zones?”
I was unable to reach Los Angeles County officials before press time for The Fight, but it’s worth noting that, amid the battle over Hecate’s approval, L.A. County planning officials began preparing to update their renewable energy ordinance to include battery storage development regulation – an indication they may need new methods to site and build more battery storage. There’s no timeline for when those changes will take place.
And more of the week’s top news about renewable energy conflicts.
1. Benton County, Washington – A state permitting board has overridden Governor Bob Ferguson to limit the size of what would’ve been Washington’s largest wind project over concerns about hawks.
2. Adams County, Colorado – This is a new one: Solar project opponents here are making calls to residents impersonating the developer to collect payments.
3. Lander County, Nevada – Trump’s move to kill the Esmeralda 7 solar mega-project has prompted incredible backlash in Congress, as almost all of Nevada’s congressional delegation claims that not a single renewables project in the U.S. has gotten a federal permit since July.
A conversation with David Gahl of SI2
This week I spoke with David Gahl, executive director of the Solar and Storage Industries Institute, or SI2, which is the Solar Energy Industries Association’s independent industry research arm. Usually I’d chat with Gahl about the many different studies and social science efforts they undertake to try and better understand siting conflicts in the U.S.. But SI2 reached out first this time, hoping to talk about how all of that work could be undermined by the Trump administration’s grant funding cuts tied to the government shutdown. (The Energy Department did not immediately get back to me with a request for comment for this story, citing the shutdown.)
The following conversation was edited lightly for clarity.
So what SI2 funding could be cut because of the federal shutdown, and what has it been put toward?
On October 1, the Energy Department put out a list of about $7.5 billion in grants they were terminating. Approximately a week later, another larger list of grants that were slated for termination found its way into the press. There’s an outstanding question about what this other list floating around means, and only DOE can verify the document’s accuracy, but we have two projects that were on that bigger list.
The first was $2.5 million supporting research into how power companies engage communities. We were coming up with a list of community engagement innovations — the idea was to actually test, through rigorous social science research at project sites, which of these innovations produces the best outcomes. We were going to have empirical data that said, If you approach communities in this way you’re more likely to get support, and if you approach communities this other way you wouldn’t.
The second was $3 million to bring diverse stakeholders together to talk about siting and permitting reform, best practices, guidance to make development smoother. The concept there was to bring traditionally warring parties to come up with a framework and tools to help the siting process. If you can get people together to come up with best practices, you can typically move things faster.
This was an “uncommon dialogue” – there was “uncommon dialogue” before on hydropower resources – and this was related to large-scale solar facilities and conservation. It’s not location-specific, more bringing the groups together to talk about a higher level set of issues, not specific projects. Keep in mind, this is relatively small potatoes.
What was the status of that work?
It started earlier in the year and it’s been rolling along. There’s been a lot of progress made so far. People have developed work plans and are working through the issues.
If the funding is canceled, there’s also opportunity for private money to potentially step in, but it puts both initiatives in a precarious place. But to the broader point, the administration has talked about how it wants energy “abundance” and more electrons on the grid to meet growing demand. And these projects funded by the department are addressing key problems to putting electrons onto the grid. Cancellation of these grants is just a complete reversal of what they’re talking about in other forums.
How so? Help me understand how this work actually trickles down to individual project decisions.
One of the challenges with siting any kind of large-scale energy project is getting community buy-in and ensuring the permitting process moves smoothly, that parties aren’t going to be litigating against each other. So if you can come up with ways to make sure the communities feel heard and are designed according to what communities want, you can probably avoid some litigation down the road.
Do you have any indication this government supports the work you’re describing?
What they’ve made clear is they want more electrons to come onto the grid to support data centers and the advancement of artificial intelligence. Canceling grants like these … I mean, we’re talking about potentially canceling projects that make it harder to meet the goal of putting more electricity onto the grid.