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What do I know about this series going into it?
I’ve never watched Curb Your Enthusiasm. I’ve also never watched Arrested Development. Why do I mention the latter? Because the two shows occupy the same slot in my head of “oft-cancelled, oft-returned modern sitcoms about terrible people that I haven’t watched”. I have seen at least one short clip from each, but I’m not sure which of the following facts apply to which show:
Made by and starring Larry David as a spiritual successor to Seinfeld
A meme about somebody painted blue saying he “blue himself”
A Jewish guy getting angry at another Jewish guy for humming a piece by Wagner
Michael Cera appears in it
A meme about asking how much a banana can possibly cost
A meme in which the show’s theme tune is played over a slow zoom in on Chris Christie staring into the middle distance as he endorses Donald Trump in 2016
Recap
Instantly I recognize the theme tune as the one from the Chris Christie meme, so that’s one mystery solved.
Captions identify the main character as Larry David (mystery #2 solved). He is on a plane about to take off for Atlanta, and is the clichéd jerk who refuses to put his phone on airplane mode or put his seatbelt on. For some reason he seems to know everybody on the plane, some of whom seem to be close-but-vitriolic friends of his, and all of whom have left their phones on. We are introduced to Larry’s hypocrisy as he turns his friends in one by one to the stewardess while simultaneously demanding to be told who turned him in.
One of the friends mentions that he hasn’t yet watched Larry’s show Seinfeld, so it seems creating that show is something the fictional and real Larry Davids have in common.
After they land, we discover that even the extras in this universe are jerks: a woman on the highway won’t let Larry change lanes and gives him the finger (though he could have just slowed down and changed lanes behind her).
There’s a news report: Larry is on trial, though they don’t say for what. I’m too quickly introduced to a circle of supporting characters that I can’t keep up with: Richard and Cynthia and Jeff and Leon. Larry accuses Cynthia of being the woman who wouldn’t let him change lanes, but she denies it.
Larry and friends discuss what restaurant to go to; somebody recommends Mexican food, but Larry says that “Susan” doesn’t like Mexican. Susan pulls him aside and is angry: I told you that in confidence, how could you reveal that about me? Larry (and I) can’t understand why not liking Mexican food is supposed to be some big secret. They end up going instead to a restaurant called Auntie Rae’s, where they obsess over how amazing the salad dressing is. Auntie Rae won’t give them the recipe, which will probably become important later.
In the courtroom, Larry micromanages his lawyer’s voir dire, stereotyping the jurors’ political opinions based on their appearance and trying to kick all the right-wingers out. This too will probably turn out to be ill-informed and come back to bite him. During the discussion I finally learn that he violated some sort of Georgia voting law, but I don’t know how yet.
At the hotel later, Larry runs into Cynthia again and is still obsessing over whether she’s the one who gave him the finger or not. She still denies it. (I think she might be Allison Janney from The West Wing.) He also interrogates her over whether it’s true that she attempted suicide the last time Larry’s friend Richard broke up with her. This pisses her off enough that she doesn’t go to her date with Richard. When Larry tells Richard that Cynthia will meet him in her car instead, he gets mad that Larry is trying to ruin his relationship. (I recognize the actor playing Richard but can’t place him.)
Day 2 of the trial: There are pro-Larry protests outside the courthouse. Ted Danson has a cameo as a lunatic shouting “stop suppressing the vote” into a megaphone. Ah, it’s not just a cameo; he seems to be a regular character. Ah, he’s actually playing a parody version of himself. Larry accuses Ted of just seeking publicity.
Inside, the prosecutor delivers his opening argument. He says he’s going to bring witnesses to show a pattern of bad behavior on Larry’s part – which, if this pans out, means it’s going to be a retread of the series finale of Seinfeld, where they brought in all the supporting characters from famous episodes to say how awful the main characters are. But I suspect they’re planning to subvert that expectation.
The defense attorney, meanwhile, uses her opening argument to argue for jury nullification: Larry is like Jesus, and this law against giving people water in line to vote is unjust (so now I finally know what he did wrong). But the jurors aren’t paying any attention to her, because right behind her back Larry is hunting down and maliciously killing a fly.
The first few witnesses are called (so maybe we’re not subverting this after all):
Joe Boccabella, aka “Mocha Joe”. Larry complained about how bad his coffee shop was, and then opened a coffee shop next door called “The Spite Store”.
Matsu Takahashi: Owns a golf club. Larry is always disgruntled, never calls “fore”, and killed Takahashi’s black swan.
Alexander Vindman: (Is this the Vindman or an actor?) Testifies that Larry tried to bribe a councilwoman and compares him to Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. In an echo of the first Trump impeachment, Larry interrupts the testimony to insist that his conversation with the councilwoman was “a perfect call”.
That night, Larry’s friend Jeff calls up Auntie Rae’s, gives a false name, and pretends his wife is in the hospital having an allergic reaction to the salad dressing and he needs to know what’s in it. The next morning Jeff gives a bottle of the salad dressing and a copy of the recipe to his wife for their anniversary.
Meanwhile, Larry’s other friend Leon is binge-watching Seinfeld and raves about how great it is. Leon thinks Kramer is a jerk for constantly walking into Jerry’s apartment uninvited, implying that Leon acts the same way.
Leon also tells Larry about somebody he knew who pretended to be in a wheelchair to get sympathy in court. This gives Larry an idea.
One of Larry’s friends rolls into court in a wheelchair and a wig, pretending to be Larry’s wife. I can tell from the voice that this friend is a character I’ve already met, but don’t know which one. The two of them lay it on thick in front of the jury: She got hit by a bus! I gave her mouth-to-mouth and carried her to my car! He works in an animal shelter with disabled kids! And so forth. The judge does nothing to stop this blatant attempt at jury tampering.
More witnesses are called:
Rachel Heineman: A religious Jew who got stuck on a ski lift with Larry and jumped off to avoid being alone with him.
Unknown person: Larry peed on her painting of Jesus.
Unknown person: Larry shouted in offensively fake Japanese at a sushi restaurant.
Unknown person: Larry stole shoes from a holocaust museum.
Unknown person: Larry gave him COVID by drinking from his glass and not telling him.
Tara Michaelson: She gave Larry a hug when she was eight years old; for some reason he had a water bottle in his pants, which was mistaken for an erection.
Rae Black: She’s the woman who owns the salad dressing restaurant. I initially assume she’s there to accuse Larry and Jeff of stealing her recipe, but it turns out she’s a witness for Larry. She’s the one to whom Larry gave water in violation of the law. Unfortunately for Larry, however, she recognizes Jeff’s voice as she walks into the courtroom, realizes that the phone call came from him and Larry, and turns hostile. She accuses Larry of using the “n” word around her and stealing her recipe.
This last accusation infuriates Larry’s wheelchair-faking friend, who it turns out is Jeff’s wife. She’s furious that her anniversary gift turned out to have been stolen, so she storms out without the wheelchair, revealing the ruse.
Meanwhile, outside, Ted Danson successfully got himself arrested for the publicity.
After court, Larry meets Jerry Seinfeld and they have a discussion about bearded ladies, which I don’t understand at all.
Day 3 (final day of testimony): Larry takes the stand. His attorney asks him how hot it was the day of voting, but she clearly did a bad job on witness prep because he immediately violates the rule against going on long digressions. “I don’t sweat”, he says, as if trying to remind the jury of Prince Andrew.
During cross-examination, the prosecutor establishes through flashback that Larry stole flowers from a memorial; stole a golf club from a coffin; stole a letter from Vindman to a city councilor exposing his bribery attempt; and sent in an obituary to the newspaper that contained a typo calling the deceased a “cunt” rather than (I assume) an “aunt”. That last isn’t his fault, of course, but it doesn’t help that he happily testifies that the typo was not inaccurate.
This is followed by ever-more flashbacks of awful things: pretending to have suffered from sexual assault, hiring a prostitute so he could drive in a carpool lane, inviting a sex offender to a Passover seder, etc.
Day 4: The jury reaches a verdict. As Larry enters the courtroom, Richard thanks Larry for exposing who Cynthia really was. He reports that he broke up with Cynthia again and that she has bought a gun – though not to kill herself, but to kill Larry. Leon reports that he has finished binging Seinfeld except for the finale. “I hear you fucked it up,” Leon says.
Larry is found guilty. He gets one year in prison – exactly what Seinfeld et al. got in their own finale.
Later, Jerry Seinfeld comes to visit Larry in prison. He has news: Larry is being released! At first I think he’s just messing with him, but it turns out to be true. The night before the verdict, Jerry had gone out with friends at a Mexican restaurant, even though he doesn’t like Mexican food (Larry promises not to tell anyone, and Jerry is bewildered as to why he’d care). There he had met a guy who looked a bit like Joe Pesci and they traded lines from Goodfellas. (We actually saw that scene earlier in the episode, but I didn’t take notes on it because it seemed irrelevant.) But it turned out that guy was on the jury, which means he broke jury sequestration, which means the verdict got thrown out.
On their way out of the prison, Larry hits his forehead. “This is how we should’ve ended the finale [of Seinfeld]!” he exclaims, and he and Jerry feel stupid at how much better that would have been.
On the flight on the way back home, Jeff’s wife opens the window and covers the plane in glare and the characters all descend into bickering.
I discover in the credits that Alexander Vindman really did play himself.
Unresolved questions
Breaking jury sequestration isn’t the same thing as an acquittal. Will there be a retrial?
What is Cynthia planning to do with her gun?
What will Leon think of the Seinfeld finale?
Ratings
Story: 6/10. I commend the show for not going as far as the Seinfeld finale did in leaning on being a clip show. But the plot was nevertheless very simple, and several of the subplots didn’t really lead anywhere.
Writing: 9/10. Let’s get this out of the way first: there’s a good reason I have not watched this show before. I strongly dislike humor about awful people doing awful things to other awful people. But as always, I evaluate each show on its own terms.
And the writing in this episode was masterful.
The theme of the episode is expressed in its title: “No Lessons Learned”. This title is of course a reflection of Seinfeld’s famous “No hugging, no learning” policy, just as the events of the episode reflected those of the Seinfeld finale.
The theme of not learning lessons plays out in three layers:
First, the literal and trivial: Larry tells a child who throws a ball at his head that he has never learned a lesson in his life, then later admits to his friends that he did in fact learn a lesson once: not to call people “Captain”, because it pisses them off.
Second, the plot-relevant: Is this the first time that Larry will be forced to pay for his bad behavior? And if so, will this break through his self-assured “I was always right” veneer?
Third, the meta: the real-life Larry David learned no lessons from ending Seinfeld on a pointless, self-referential courtroom plot, and does the exact same thing again on Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The episode is constructed brilliantly: All three layers are subverted, and all three layers interact with one another in surprising and interesting ways.
On the literal and trivial layer, the one lesson Larry has ever learned in his life is presented, at first, as a throwaway joke: this one guy from Larry’s past hated being called “Captain” for some unknown reason, so he learned never to call people that anymore. It’s silly and pointless and didn’t seem like it would have any further relevance to the plot. But then the writers take the extra step of having Larry unlearn that lesson. He deliberately calls the prosecutor “Captain” in an attempt to rile him up, but this wholly fails, causing only momentary confusion. So Larry discovers that even the one lesson he ever learned, he shouldn’t have learned.
Is that, then, the true lesson? That Larry now knows not to learn this type of lesson? That he should not take one person’s idiosyncratic hatred of being called “Captain” and generalize it?
No, because the episode deliberately sets it up such that Larry fails to learn that lesson as well. Susan has an idiosyncratic fear that somebody will learn she dislikes Mexican food, and yet Larry generalizes it in exactly the same way, confusing Jerry by accident just as he did to the prosecutor on purpose. In other words, Larry is so incapable of learning lessons that, paradoxically, he can’t even learn which lessons are not worth learning.
This is why Larry cannot learn his lesson on the plot-relevant layer either. Larry is on trial not for the many many many awful things he’s done in his life, but for the one good deed he has ever performed: giving water to a thirsty woman.
When Larry is convicted, he of course shows no signs of remorse or self-reflection as he is led out of the courtroom, nor while he is seated in his cell. And then the gods of the Curb Your Enthusiasm universe arrange for him to be released almost immediately, further reinforcing that he does not need to learn any lessons. If the episode is to be true to its theme, Larry cannot pay for his crimes in any meaningful fashion.
Which leads us to the meta layer. Larry claims – in-character and, by writing this episode, out-of-character – that he has learned no lessons from the way the Seinfeld finale was badly received.
And yet he clearly has learned lessons from the Seinfeld finale, because this one plays out very differently.
In Seinfeld, the law that the main characters violated may have been silly (failing to come to the assistance of a person in need), but it was also straightforward. Their lawyer made no real effort to fight the charges; his only attempt at a defense is that there was a worse bad guy out there. And the plot was equally straightforward: throughout the trial every beat goes against them, and a guilty verdict was never in doubt from the moment it began.
But in Curb Your Enthusiasm, there are two arguments that lead the viewer to expect an acquittal. First, the episode makes explicit its theme that Larry never learns a lesson, and that theme is facially incompatible with a guilty verdict. Second, Larry is accused of violating a law that all of the characters, including the prosecutor, agree is immoral. Should breaking an immoral law incur punishment? The arguments presented are strong enough that one might well assume that acquittal is the only moral solution. (As above, I am taking he episode’s moral position here at face value; while there are real-world arguments in favor of this law, the episode did well not to bring them up, because delving into that particular debate would not have been in its interests).
Yet there are also three arguments that favor conviction: he did, in fact, break a law; his awful behavior throughout the proceedings make it exceedingly unlikely the jury will view him sympathetically; every beat of the trial goes against him; and the real-life Larry clearly wanted the plot of this finale to hew closely to that of Seinfeld.
The episode thus strikes a perfect balance between the two possible outcomes: Should an awful man be punished, or should the jury nullify an immoral law? Will the fictional Larry finally learn a lesson and be found guilty, or will the real-life Larry learn a lesson and change the ending of a badly-received episode? I wasn’t joking earlier when I said that I was in genuine suspense as the verdict came in.
And that very fact enables the episode to flip the script. Where the Seinfeld finale was a nostalgia-laden clip show, Curb Your Enthusiasm asked real questions and provoked real thought. In doing so, real-life Larry proves that he did learn a lesson. He doesn’t need to demonstrate it further by ending the trial with an acquittal, and that frees him to stick to the same verdict – and sentence – as before.
But of course a show like this can’t actually let viewers come away with a serious conclusion like that. So they hide the real lesson behind a decoy: fictional Larry is released on a technicality, and realizes that this new ending was what the Seinfeld finale was missing all along. And while that would indeed have been a good change, it still would have done nothing to solve that episode’s structural problems.
Which brings us right back to the first layer, and Larry being able to learn lessons only when they are trivial, and only when they are false.
Beautiful.
Production: 6/10. There was surprisingly good acting from the kid who threw the ball at Larry’s head. The scene on the highway was badly filmed, such that I couldn’t tell who was trying to speed up and who was trying to slow down and when.
In truth, that represents me scraping the bottom of the barrel for something to comment on. You watch a show like this for the humor, not for the production values, and very little stood out for good or for ill.
Characterization: 4/10. Everybody in the Curb Your Enthusiasm universe is an asshole. Larry, Jeff, Jeff’s wife, Cynthia, Richard, Ted Danson, Auntie Rae, Leon, the juror who broke sequestration, the judge, the woman who jumped from the ski lift, everybody.
Even the one ostensibly good person – a woman whose son hit Larry with a ball, and who wanted to force her child to apologize – is trying to raise her child at the expense of other people’s time and patience, when there are numerous better ways to handle that situation.
It's not hard to learn all the characters’ personalities when they’re all the same: willing to lie, cheat, and steal to take the slightest advantage, and being self-righteously hypocritical when others do the same.
Ironically, there is a glaring inconsistency in Larry’s own personality. At the same time as he is an asshole, he is also repeatedly the victim of circumstance: in several of the flashbacks (and possibly, as I explored above, in the action for which he is on trial) he is doing something actively good or morally neutral and is merely mistaken for being an asshole.
Even within the episode we see an example, as Larry promises to keep Jerry Seinfeld’s confidence on the subject of Mexican food – and yet happily interrogates Cynthia about her suicide attempt until she screams that there are five lights, and turns in his other friends for using their phones on the plane. The amount of consideration he has for other people’s feelings seems completely random, depending on the needs of a particular scene. So is he a complete ass or is he misunderstood?
Clarity: 9/10. I was left at the end with a few trivial questions and a few unknown character names, but had no trouble following the plot once I learned what Larry was on trial for.
Closure: 7/10. The one drawback to Larry being released from jail immediately is that it undermines this episode’s status as the end of the series. When Jerry et al. were sent to jail, that was it, show over. Behind bars they can’t wreak any more havoc in the lives of the innocent women, mailmen, fashion designers, and baseball team owners of Manhattan. Whereas here there is no reason we can’t have another episode come out next week in which Larry downloads a virus-laden illegal copy of Candy Crush, which connects to the entertainment system on the flight back from Atlanta because his phone wasn’t on airplane mode, and interrupts some eight-year-old’s viewing of Frozen 2 with pornographic ads.
Still, though, the clip show elements plus the heavy paralleling of the Seinfeld finale make clear that this episode is intended as a close to the series.
Do I want to watch the series now?
As I’ve said, I strongly dislike this entire genre. But this show is clearly its pinnacle.