The series finale, aptly titled “No Lessons Learned”—referencing the decision to echo Seinfeld’s widely derided finale, as well as Larry’s inability to change—was celebrated by critics and fans in large part because of how true it felt to David’s sensibility. “It’s more than just about Curb, and it’s more than just about Seinfeld,” says Schaffer, who directed the episode and also worked with David on that iconic NBC sitcom. “To me, it ended up becoming about Larry and this kind of antiestablishment DNA of ‘I’m going to do what I’m going to do and, basically, f*ck all y’all.’”
David’s Seinfeld cocreator, Jerry Seinfeld, recently made headlines for bemoaning the state of TV comedy, claiming the medium has gotten far less funny because of “the extreme left and PC crap, and people worrying so much about offending other people.” The average Curb Your Enthusiasm viewer may not have noticed this, given that show’s consistency from 2000 to now. I ask David whether he’s felt a similar shift at all in the culture, and whether that impacted the making of the show. The answer: Not really.
“We have our fans, and they don’t want us to be politically correct or take into account a lot of things that are going on, and they don’t care about wokeness,” David says. “They just want to laugh, and they’re not going to be offended by it. And we don’t care either.”
Take David’s dynamic with his fellow actors. Susie Essman has long been giving one of the funniest performances on TV as Larry’s chief foil, Susie Greene—wife of his manager, Jeff (Jeff Garlin), and maestro of “go f*ck yourself” delivery. (Note to Emmy voters: Essman has still, somehow, never been nominated.) She and David can get filthy, vicious, and gloriously rude in their interplay, which is always improvised. “In all these years, we’ve never discussed the character ever—Larry just got what I was doing and wrote more toward that, and I got what he wanted and went more toward that,” Essman says. “I yell, I scream, I kick people out of my house, I tell them all to go f*ck off, and then they pay me, and then I go home. What’s better?”
That sense of organic scene-to-scene discovery has long been intrinsic to Curb. “People ask me all the time, ‘What do you have to call on to get angry?’” Essman explains. “Well, these guys are always f*cking with me!” But the episodic constructions remain rigorous. “Each episode, we’re not really sure where we’re going to end up, but we know we need to find the funniest conclusion for every episode,” David says. “How are these things going to build and build to a funny thing?” He cites a few favorites, like “The Doll” or season seven’s “Denise Handicap,” as examples, and says that this goal extends to the way they’d devise a finale: “The season is an episode, just writ large. How are we going to take these ideas and make them the biggest, funniest ending?”
David isn’t sure he even would have ended Curb had he not realized the finale for this season could function perfectly as the conclusion to the show overall. He and Schaffer knew the premiere would end with David getting arrested for flouting a ridiculous Georgia election law. About halfway through the 10-episode outline, they realized a trial would naturally follow. Then, boom. The only thing they really didn’t plan for was the accidental comic symmetry of former president Donald Trump getting arrested in Georgia over the events of the 2020 election. “That picture of Trump was a total gift to us,” David says. “When he got arrested in Georgia, we had written the show. The show was basically done. We were waiting for the strike to end so we could finish editing. And we were just, ‘Wait, that guy got arrested?’” After the actors strike ended, David had enough time to film a parody mugshot.
Richard Lewis’s Final Interview: “I’ve Had Such an Amazing Life. I’m a Lucky Man”
Like Seinfeld, Curb brought back many fan favorites from over the years for the finale, from Larry’s old coffee shop rival Mocha Joe (Saverio Guerra) to the Orthodox woman named Rachel Heineman who leapt from a ski lift nearly to her death to escape Larry. (The actor who portrayed her, Iris Bahr, flew from Israel to return to the show for the finale.) But not everyone from their very long list could make the cut. David and Schaffer wanted to squeeze in Denise Handicap or the beloved Krazee Eyez Killa, but had to stick with who would make sense in a narrative context. “[Krazee Eyez] is a great classic Curb thing, but for the comedy, it doesn’t make sense in the story of a trial,” Schaffer says.
Along those same lines: The show didn’t end on Jerry Seinfeld gracefully escorting his old Seinfeld partner out of jail. Instead, it gave us one last scene of Larry, his best friend Richard Lewis (who died shortly after filming), his roommate Leon (J.B. Smoove), his ex-wife Cheryl (Cheryl Hines), her new husband Ted Danson, and Jeff and Susie all flying home from Georgia. We’re treated to one final squabble, another set-up that David and Schaffer had considered for years before finally executing it for the very end of their show.
Susie keeps her window shade up so that she can read a magazine, to a sleepy Larry’s absolute disgust. They argue. Susie gets in one last “go f*ck yourself,” before an even meaner line closes the show for good: “Go back to f*cking jail, Larry!”
“If I may be a little self-reverential, I loved that I had the last line,” Essman says with a laugh. “And I loved that it ended with all of us—it ended with the family. Especially since Richard was there. Oh, I’ll start to cry now. That was just special. It was all special.”
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