Curb Your Enthusiasm, finale review: this Seinfeld retread is not the send off Larry David deserves
Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm has had a prett-ay, prett-ay, prett-ay good run, all things considered. The cult comedy started in 1999 as a one-off special – the joke being Seinfeld co-creator David didn’t want to go back into stand-up and was being pushed on to the stage against his will. Yet Curb soon blossomed into a sitcom that demolished the barrier between comedian and audience, as David enumerated the banal annoyances we all recognised from everyday life. Irritating neighbours, smug spouses, friends forever trying to get one over on you. The list went on, as did Curb over 12 seasons.
However, David seems to have never made peace with the backlash directed at Seinfeld after it had ended – 18 months before Curb began – with one of the most controversially terrible finales until Game of Thrones flamed out. In that grand farewell, Jerry Seinfeld and his fellow onscreen characters were put on trial for their selfishness throughout the series – the prosecutor calling to the stand people whom they had done wrong over the years.
It was contrived. More importantly, it wasn’t funny. That failure appears to have rankled David, who has approached the last ever episode of Curb not as an opportunity to say goodbye but as one to correct his missteps with Seinfeld.
He should have let it go. Curb has been declining in quality for some time – or perhaps it had just run out of things to say about the trials of being disagreeable in a world that demands we are all effusive and extroverted. Either way, this sign-off, while delivering plenty of solid “grumpy Larry” gags, fell apart as it reached too far back to Seinfeld.
Larry was returning to Atlanta, where he faced trial for breaking voter regulations (in violation of Georgia election laws, he’d handed out water to the aunt of his pal Leon Black as she queued to vote).
Before the big day in court, there was room for some classic Curb. Larry got in a row with the cabin crew on his plane over his refusal to turn off his phone. Later, in Atlanta a woman who blocked him from changing lanes turned out to be the old flame of his pal Richard Lewis (who was ill during filming and passed away before the instalment aired). Inevitably, Larry and his manager, Jeff, teamed up to place a fake call to Auntie Rae – Leon’s aunt – to coax her secret salad dressing recipe. David was playing the hits and they had lost none of their zing.
Sadly, the wheels came off during the courtroom scenes. In a replay of Seinfeld, figures from Larry’s past lined up to testify to his awfulness. They included his golf rival, Mr. Takahashi, his coffee shop nemesis, Mocha Joe and Bruce Springsteen, whom David had infected with Covid. Also, in Atlanta where his pals Ted Danson, Jerry Seinfeld and Leon (JB Smoove)– who was watching Seinfeld re-runs. “The finale. I heard some terrible things about it,” he told Seinfeld. “I heard you f_____ it up”.
Larry was found guilty, but Jerry recognised one of the jurors from a restaurant the previous night. The jury was supposed to be sequestered, meaning the judge had no choice but declare a mistrial. On the plane back to Los Angeles, Jeff’s wife Susie opened her window shutter. Larry objected, and the action concluded with one final row.
Much like The Simpsons, Curb Your Enthusiasm had been a shadow of its once great self for several seasons. There was much too much Seinfeld in the concluding episode – who, apart from David and Seinfeld himself, cares in 2024 that the show’s last flourish had been a damp squib?
But – whether bickering with airline staff or having a meltdown on the motorway – there were still flashes of the old Curb genius. A farewell that might have been a disaster was a qualified success. Given Curb’s recent trajectory, that was just about enough.
