TV shows we love: Curb Your Enthusiasm

Larry David ended Curb Your Enthusiasm on April 7, 2024, closing a comedy that spent 24 years turning minor social offences into elaborate disasters. David played a semi-fictional version of himself in Los Angeles and wrote only a rough outline for each episode, leaving the cast to improvise the dialogue, with such a method producing unscripted hysterics that the actors often tried to hide. Most episodes take a trivial grievance and let it accumulate into a web of interconnected mishaps, with David absorbing most of the damage. David’s character is not meant to be liked, breaking unspoken rules of etiquette in nearly every episode, whether by keeping his shoes on in a shoes-off house or opening a coffee shop beside the one run by his rival Mocha Joe purely out of spite. His cadre of Los Angeles elites supply most of the friction, chiefly the notorious Susie Greene, played by stand-up comedian Susie Essman, delivering foul-mouthed tirades at Larry’s expense. Her philandering husband Jeff, Larry’s manager, played by Jeff Garlin, frequently allows the fallout of his affairs to lands on Larry too. Bob Einstein, who died in 2019, played Marty Funkhouser, a blunt friend who clashed with David and Richard Lewis, a friend of David in real life, played a fictionalised version of himself and died in February 2024, before the finale aired. When a neighbour accuses Larry of being a self-loathing Jew after he is heard whistling Wagner, he replies that he does hate himself, but that it has nothing to do with being Jewish. One of the show’s most notorious episodes is Larry’s exchange with his girlfriend’s flamboyant, sewing-obsessed son, which I shan’t ruin. In season four Larry was cast in Mel Brooks’s Broadway production of The Producers, with Brooks, playing himself, hiring him in the hope of wrecking his own show. In season seven Larry staged a Seinfeld reunion to win back Cheryl, which brought Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander into the story. The final season followed Larry to Atlanta, where he was arrested for handing a bottle of water to Leon’s aunt as she waited in a voting queue, a breach of the state’s Election Integrity Act, the arrest briefly making him a national hero. Critics credit the show with have changing the nature of television comedy, heralding in the so-called cringe wave alongside Ricky Gervais’ The Office.