Curb Your Enthusiasm is Back (S.11)

Sounds Good!

Curb Your Enthusiasm is back. Season 11 is playing currently – you’ll find it on the internet, it’s an HBO show and in New Zealand that means episodes are arriving on a Monday night and available on Neon.

There’s only two episodes so far – and it’s got the feel of classic ‘old school’ Curb.

Larry David’s show is 20 years old now. Seasons 1-8 arrived between 2000 and 2011 and then there was a big gap until the show came back in 2017. Season 10 followed last year and now we have the 11th.

The first four seasons were a revelation – I gobbled them up via DVD box-sets, in each case I binged them in a day. Before the streaming services hit NZ I was still a devotee of the TV series boxset. I was also working in a music store that imported and sold DVDs – and then later a bookstore (that also sold DVDs). So this was a big part of the ritual. Curb was a secret club for a while. The post-grad honours class for us counter-clerks that had loved Seinfeld and, maybe embarrassingly, still quoted from it, or fondly remembered particular epsiodes or setups within certain scenes.

Curb Your Enthusiasm was an all-new level of cringe.

Larry played an exaggerated (and actually false) version of himself, heightened by the knowledge that in his days as a stand-up comic and a writer on SNL (for a disastrous season) he had been ‘difficult’. He had been ‘challenging’. His personality was spiky. These famous stories of walking-off early because and audience didn’t get his jokes, or because he didn’t like the look of them – and then the mega-success of Seinfeld (and the ‘George’ character being based on Larry/largely written by Larry) was the perfect set-up for a dramedy version of a ‘real life’ privileged existence mocking the conventions and griping at idiots.

There was a huge dip in quality during season five – because all things have a dip. The first four seasons were just about perfect. So many great cameos, so many brilliant set-ups. And then it turned to a self-loathing version of self-parody.

But it came back. Slowly. Surely. Seasons six, seven and eight washed the tase of season five and though they never quite got to the dizzy heights of the very best of the first four seasons it was still addictive and hilarious stuff; the comedy you tested your friendships on. There are people that lap up Curb and there are people that cannot watch it.

The ‘new’ seasons have been good enough – but have somewhat fallen into the trap of searching for a theme, and for every fan that can just watch Larry get into petty scrapes and scraps endlessly and wait for a Seinfeld-esque line-invention (the stop and chats) there are people bored of it. Larry’s edge dulled for many back in 2005 or 2010.

I liked the last couple of seasons – eventually. I struggled with certain episodes but it’s still easy enough to watch. I’m also weary of coming across like a Larry David Fanatic because people that swear by every episode of Curb tend to scare me. People that see no wrong in anything they watch also tend to scare me.

But season 11 has started with no real axe to grind, and with a reminder of the fun and silliness of the early episodes. The simplicity of tearing the tab off a can of Larry and tossing him into the room like a grenade.

Television walks a fine line now – sensitivity reads comb over scripts and pull back on lines that are designed to bristle; escapist comedy must look over its shoulder to check it hasn’t offended anyone. And that can ruin the jokes. You aren’t supposed to like the characters in Curb Your Enthusiasm, nor relate to them particularly – you are meant to enjoy the absurdity, the silliness, and to stop and recognise the human pettiness. And so I’m glad to have Curb back to its earliest roots. But for how long? I hope the season can sustain itself. And I also hope the pin gets pulled soon. I can’t keep tuning in for too many more after this.

So I’ll leave you today with a few favourite moments from across the years.

And I’d love to know if you’re (still) a fan or if you’ve never enjoyed this show. Any favourite episodes, seasons, moments in particular?