Larry David got the opportunity to run the great unresolved question of his career back once more, and he took it. And while his previous series ended with its protagonist in prison, his current one is ending with David himself walking free.
This season of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” had seemed, from its first episode, to be building toward an ending that either mirrored or inverted the way “Seinfeld,” co-created by David and Jerry Seinfeld, had wrapped up in 1998. The season’s mega-arc has been the ongoing uncertainty around the character Larry’s having accidentally run afoul of Georgia election laws. And, throughout the season, askance references to the “Seinfeld” finale (which featured the core cast going to prison after having been forced to hear endless testimony as to their self-centeredness) suggested that the right way to wrap up a series was very much on David’s mind.
The “Seinfeld” finale — which David, who had left the series, returned to write — was pilloried at the time, but if one watches it today, outside the heat of the show’s press-choreographed march to the finish line, it’s not bad. It’s just a bit sloppy. In that, it was already more like a generic episode of “Curb” than a generic episode of “Seinfeld” — and then the “Curb” finale just reiterated the formula. I’ll admit that I was surprised to realize that this “Curb” episode, in the present day, really was just doing the trial formula all over again, and that I was dismayed that the character witnesses, this time, were plucked generally though not exclusively from recent episodes. (“Seinfeld’s” witnesses, like the Soup Nazi, had the weight of having blossomed by popular mandate into TV history; “Curb’s” included Bruce Springsteen, talking about something that happened on last week’s episode; Alexander Vindman was also back, for some reason.)
“Seinfeld” ended with its characters confined to prison, put away on a technicality after years of abusing their fellow man. It’s prime Larry David, in that it seems like an ending David had in mind, toward which he constructed a series of events that made sense — sort of. “Curb’s” ending was still more confusing: Larry is convicted, but then let off on a technicality after the real-life Jerry Seinfeld sees a juror breaking sequester, spurring a mistrial ruling. Larry flies off into the sunset, with a relatively uninspired quarrel with Susie (Susie Essman) marking the end of this narrative. Earlier in the episode, David had made the barely-buried subtext of the series text: Confronting a child, he seems ready to tell him off or to deliver unsolicited parenting advice to his mother, before declaring, “I’m 76 years old, and I have never learned a lesson in my entire life.”
Jail can’t wake him up, but TV production might: One can read this episode as the response to lessons he learned from the response to the “Seinfeld” finale. And there are, indeed, moments of fun that were missing there — David and Seinfeld, walking out of prison together, remark how much more fun it would have been if Jerry, Elaine and the gang had gotten a similar last-minute reprieve. Ha-ha. And Essman has great moments elsewhere in the finale, before her appearance in the out-of-ideas final scene.
But the finale spoke, in the main, to both the strengths and weaknesses of “Curb” relative to what might — had he been less ambitious in the years after — have been David’s great work. “Seinfeld” was elastic for a network show, but it had its limits. “Curb,” which debuted as a regular series in 2000 after first airing as a special in 1999, is as old as this century, and has moved forward by perpetually pushing limits. It’s done a solid if not always optimally elegant job of tracking the evolving dinner-party trending topics over two decades. The show’s on-the-fly nature — with its wholly improvised conversations built around the loose outline of a plot — effectively invented a category of entertainment, but also means that the show is by its nature a blunt instrument. Larry and his friends are loopily, outrageously funny; they live out loud; they play games of one-upsmanship that are genuinely delightful to watch. But they are rarely sly.
This, as much as the West Coast-vs.-East Coast divide or the profanity allowed by premium cable, is what differentiates “Curb” from “Seinfeld” — on the latter series, (nearly) every episode’s final minutes had a pleasing, Swiss-watch quality, as the disparate storylines clicked neatly into place and the characters came back together once more. “Curb” has made a practice of bringing its episodes in for memorable landings, too, but its endings more frequently come as wild, who’d-have-thunk narrative swings. (This has become truer and truer in recent seasons, the construction of which has grown ever more lackadaisical.) On “Seinfeld,” one admires the logic; on “Curb,” one admires the audacity.
Which also meant that on “Seinfeld,” those who were not bitterly disappointed by the finale could appreciate a certain poetic logic to it. The only poetry to “Curb’s” finale was free verse. (It’s telling that on “Seinfeld’s” finale, we saw all the witnesses and got their stories placed in context; toward the end of “Curb’s” testimony against Larry, a prosecutor played by Greg Kinnear was just listing off things that had happened on a series that was improvisatory to the end.) Larry will be missed. But he may just deserve a break.