‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Is Going Out With a Farcical Frenzy

Matt’s Rating:

The Larry David of Curb Your Enthusiasm never met anyone he couldn’t annoy — and the feeling is nearly always mutual. After 12 seasons airing over nearly 25 years, Larry gets it: “I’ve been expecting more from myself my whole life. It’s just not fair,” he tells a new acquaintance who had promised to pay him for the simple act of being cordial. As if.

The most inspired twist in what Larry insists is his final season — talk about not fair — is the fallout from him performing an unexpected act of generosity. It lands him in hot water but also vaults him into the spotlight as a good Samaritan, a hero, a “liberal darling” even.

Obviously, this can’t last. And sure enough, as the final season spirals through more outrageously absurdist farce, with no good or (more often) bad deed going unpunished, Larry does his best, meaning his worst, to tarnish his newly golden reputation. Even the episode titles possess a cringe factor: “The Lawn Jockey.” “Disgruntled.” (Though Larry insists, “I’m disgruntled with a small ‘d.’”) And, reflecting the series’ often scatological sense of humor, “The Colostomy Bag.”

The set-ups are usually ridiculous, with Larry getting worked up over the pettiest aggravations — as his most constant and caustic critic Susie Greene (the hilarious Susie Essman) notes, “You make such a big magilla over nothing.” But many of Curb’s best moments involve Larry’s losing battle with the mundane: screaming at Siri when the device keeps misinterpreting him, getting trapped in a platitude-spouting text chain (which his buddy Freddy Funkhouser, played by Vince Vaughn, describes as “the lowest form of human communication”), clashing with a salesperson when Larry has the audacity to use a toilet — there’s a lot of toilet humor — that’s reserved for paying customers only.

HBO

One running gag too closely resembles a memorable bit from Friends, and Curb is on more solid ground when it exposes up-to-the-minute social misfires like blurting out that day’s Wordle word. “So rude it’s like sneezing in someone’s face,” Larry gripes to his grotesque current companion Irma Kostroski (the fearless Tracey Ullman), to whom he’s been guilted into not dumping for six months, lest she relapse into drinking.

Larry David knows as well as anyone the difficulty of sticking the landing on a series this revered. There are several references during the season about his having returned to Seinfeld for that megahit’s polarizing series finale. Whether he achieves a higher approval rating for Curb’s swan song remains to be seen. (HBO chose not to make the last of 10 episodes, scheduled for April 7, available for review.)

But to the end, Larry is undaunted. About to face another referendum on his character, he tells one of the season’s many lawyers, “In terms of being likable, you know what my mother used to say: ‘What’s not to like?’”

Let us count the ways. Once we stop laughing.

Curb Your Enthusiasm, Season Premiere, Sunday, February 4, 10/9c, HBO