Curb Your Enthusiasm re-made the most hated finale ever – and this time, it worked

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It appears arduous to imagine it may have ended every other manner. Curb Your Enthusiasm, the long-running HBO comedy created by and starring Larry David, lastly bowed out on Sky Comedy on Sunday with the finale of its twelfth and final season. There had been occasions earlier than when it appeared like David was completed together with his grouchy, contrarian alter-ego – most notably after the eighth season in 2011, and the six-year hole that adopted – however this time, there’s little doubt it’s over. What we received was half victory lap, half metacommentary: a characteristically unapologetic hour that ties collectively each halves of David’s virtually unparalleled contribution to the previous 35 years of American TV comedy.

The finale of David’s different inimitable, zeitgeisty studio sitcom Seinfeld, watched dwell by greater than 76 million Americans when it first aired in 1998, was notorious. In it, the 4 lead characters – together with co-creator Jerry Seinfeld as himself, and the David surrogate George Costanza, performed by Jason Alexander – have been placed on trial for transgressions towards well mannered society. It was certainly one of the most broadly disliked TV finales ever. Later, the seventh season of Curb – which reunited the forged as they staged a show-within-a-show Seinfeld revival – was broadly interpreted as a do-over by stealth. And but, with Sunday’s episode, titled “No Lessons Learned”, Curb doubled down, re-creating virtually the precise plot of Seinfeld’s finale with gleeful abandon.

The episode focuses on the “trial of Larry David”, held ostensibly to find out his guilt over an obvious act of electoral interference. The trial is, to some extent, a handy manner of strolling via a few of the sequence’ best hits. And when Larry stole sneakers from a Holocaust memorial; when he clubbed a uncommon swan to dying; when he commissioned an obituary for his aunt-in-law calling her a “beloved c***”. While the ethical reckoning in Seinfeld appeared to come back out of nowhere, it makes way more sense right here. Curb has all the time been a sequence centered on one man’s battle towards social norms. It’s Larry vs the world, now as it all the time has been.

“No Lessons Learned” is a loosely structured affair, a far cry from Curb’s early seasons, when concurrent plotlines would dovetail and collide with a type of mad, impressed unpredictability. What the finale does have, nonetheless, is an absolute glut of callbacks and visitor stars from years previous. One of Curb’s nice strengths has all the time been its supporting gamers: each the one-off superstar visitors, usually enjoying themselves – everybody from Mel Brooks to Martin Scorsese to Shaquille O’Neal – and the common supporting forged, together with comic Richard Lewis, who died a couple of weeks in the past, and JB Smoove, who joined the sequence in season six as the outrageous Leon Black, certainly one of TV’s all-time nice mid-run additions. Also current is Jerry Seinfeld, who makes positive the parallels with Seinfeld’s capper are really obtrusive. As Larry is free of jail at the episode’s finish on a technicality, he and Seinfeld joke that this is how they need to have ended their sequence.

In a really meta manner, “No Lessons Learned” is the excellent encapsulation of the Larry David persona: a person who refuses to be taught, who refuses to alter. Larry is many issues – “petty, conniving, and frankly spiteful”, as somebody places it right here – however above all, he’s incorrigible. And although Curb’s sheer comedian ingenuity could have waned considerably over the years, its core provocative sensibility remained completely impervious to alter.

“Mr David, it seems you have a history of doing the same things wrong, over and over,” the decide (performed by Breaking Bad’s Dean Norris) tells Larry, at one level. It’s true of David, and it’s true of Curb. But by no means has the improper factor felt so very proper.