The ‘Curb’ finale resembles ‘Seinfeld’s’ signoff, in a frustrating, imperfect episode
This article discusses plot points from the series finale of “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
Larry David got the opportunity to revise the controversial ending he’d chosen for his first widely loved TV series, and he stayed pretty close to the formula. But 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.
