Curb Your Enthusiasm - C or D?

Good finale, good season

finally getting around to Season 9, can I just say the part where Ted Danson is about to get his ass kicked for honking at someone and goes "it's me, Ted Danson!" and then mentions Becker before Cheers was very funny to me for some reason

Years ago I was in Omaha at this giant famous electronics warehouse, where they were showing off the then brand new high-definition televisions. A salesman came over and caught me admiring the picture, and started trying to, well, sell me on it. I told him the picture looked great, but if you didn't watch sports, there really wasn't anything else in HD to watch, and I swear when he tried to counter with all the HD options he mentioned Becker no less than three times.

enjoyed season 9, but am struggling with 10 - Larry seems more of an asshole than I usually like, have only watched 3 eps so maybe I'll warm to his new levelled-up dick self.

NY Post publishing fanfic out here

https://pagesix.com/2021/08/18/larry-david-screamed-at-alan-dershowitz-at-grocery-store-over-trump-ties/

A Page Six spy spotted the Harvard Law professor — who was once, like Larry David, a fully paid-up member of the Democratic cool kids — bumping into the comic on the porch of the island’s picturesque convenience store and community hub Chilmark General Store, and found their exchange so bizarre that they “wrote it down to remember it.”

Dershowitz: “We can still talk, Larry.”

David: “No. No. We really can’t. I saw you. I saw you with your arm around [former Trump Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo! It’s disgusting!”

Dersh: “He’s my former student [at Harvard Law]. I greet all of my former students that way. I can’t greet my former students?”

David: “It’s disgusting. Your whole enclave — it’s disgusting. You’re disgusting!”

Added the stunned source, “Larry walks away. Alan takes off his T-shirt to reveal another T-shirt [underneath it] that says, ‘It’s The Constitution Stupid!’.”

We’re told Dersh “drove off in an old, dirty Volvo.”

I was there and saw this happen and I’ve basically told everyone in my life this story since it happened on Wednesday. just absolutely surreal. Dershowitz was loudly opining about how far presumption of innocence should extend before it happened. like a caricature.

— SM (@SmMcCllgh) August 18, 2021

it was the most surreal thing I’ve ever seen. my wife and I spent the rest of our honeymoon muttering “you disgust me Alan!” at each other randomly like 3-4 times a day.

— SM (@SmMcCllgh) August 18, 2021

new season starts tonight!

Albert Brooks in the mix!

wasn't feeling the first two episodes of the new season. had a couple good bits ('she plopped') but also lots of weak jokes and overall felt kinda awkward and stilted

(also, just me or larry and jeff are suddenly insanely tanned??)

...but i was relieved that episode 3 was hilarious throughout. felt like a classic

looking forward to tonight's episode

The watermelon storyline was...uncomfortable, but otherwise the rest is fun as ever.

Best episode this season

“Does wanting to have sex with women make me sexist?” :-/

Not sure I liked the fat phobia tbh.

I keep waiting it to get back to Young Larry and Maria Sophia.

*for it

Irma Kostroski may have ultimately redeemed this otherwise decent-but-not-great season, for me.

"ok, but not tonight. I'm finishing a cleanse. I'm preparing for a colonoscopy"

decent-but-not-great sorta describes my feelings for this show in a nutshell
it's a lot of mother-in-law jokes really. but they're well executed!

Stockholm tappin’.

Good finale!

Yeah, I feel like a lot of people regarded this season as a letdown, but I think it really picked up in the latter half.

The middle episodes which had nothing to do with the plot (which this show seems to do every season) were kinda weak, particularly the one with the short limo driver. Rest was good though, particularly the last 4 episodes. The Maria Sofia actress was amazing, I had to look her up because I thought she might’ve been a Tim and Eric type casting.

Ultimately I’m pretty glad they only did one tiny Covid plot point, a show like this could do a thousand storylines on it but idk who wants to see that right now. I’m cool with TV shows just pretending the pandemic never happened.

cheryl hines is married to anti covid vaccine advocate rfk jr. larry introduced them.

“He’s a KENNEDY! What could go wrong?”

cue CYE music

MVP of the season has to be whoever does Suzie's wardrobe

^^ definitely agree

https://www.gawker.com/culture/susie-essman-unpacks-her-eye-popping-curb-wardrobe/amp

lol this look
http://imgix.bustle.com/uploads/image/2021/12/10/05ae5051-8a99-4b48-b66d-00fb4c8330a7-susie_11_5.jpg

"Stockholm Tappin'"

I liked Tracy Ullman's character; it was good to see Larry with a woman who had more to do than just react to his foibles.

she was basically Kyle 2 from South Park

Irma complaining about Leon by saying "He comes in all effing and jeffing" was the funniest moment for me

sounds like a tracy ullman line/improv. i have never heard anyone say that irl who wasn't from england.

I've never heard that expression at all actually

yeah it's a pretty niche english thing. people in the US seem to laugh whenever i say it. i think it's northern.

The episodes with Ullman get better and better. “Come watch!”
And Larry’s “she smells of brine”

one odd thing I noticed, in Episode 7 there is a poll volunteer (the guy who puts the pin on Larry's jacket) who resembles a young Larry David to a T. I thought for sure they were gonna try to get *him* to be the Young Larry replacement. I tracked him down, this is the guy:

https://twitter.com/ekleonard

and here he is in Curb:

Only thin pins for this kingpin. pic.twitter.com/EUBo2pwy73

— HBO (@HBO) December 6, 2021

I had the exact same thought

It's ran it's course. There's some good touches but so much in the new season is recycled or horribly contrived. "Larry takes a KKK robe to a Jewish dry cleaner" is a pathetic excuse for a CYE plot. Or Larry throwing away his shoes outside the Holocaust exhibit then stealing a pair of shoes from the exhibit which turn out to belong to his girlfriend's grandfather. Tracey Ullman is always funny and probably saved the season from being a total flop, but the laughably repulsive crone is a trope that I think even Shakespeare stopped using in his later plays because it was out of date. Anyway, Stanley and Helen Roper were much funnier.

Larry's "skewering" of #metoo where he videotapes his first date and asks permission for everything was seriously unfunny on top of being embarrassingly retrograde imo

I could only make it to the 2nd episode of this season, where the act of wearing ear plugs at a concert is for some reason treated like a faux pas.

Eh, I think a big part of the show's appeal lies in precisely how half-assed the story ideas (and execution!) often are and how so much of it functions as a w.c. fields-ish fuck you towards entertainment industry conventions. Like he has a long list of tropes that he passionately despises and has vowed to never come near on any episode, or if so only for the sake of doing a perverse take on such. Agree that the metoo thing was dumb, but it's not surprising that in a show based around multi-millionaires grousing about how annoying everything is that there'd be the occasional misfire

Susie Essman and JB Smoove save this for me.

"outdated humor, well done" is what this is and asking for much more is expecting chocolate milk from a bull

I've rewatched most Curb episodes within the last year and uh the plots have always been ridiculous nonsense

People complaining just don’t get it and that’s ok

Yeah I feel like at this point it's a formula and one watches it for comfort. That said, the Holocaust shoes thing was the only moment in the entire season that made me jump up and yell "oh no" and laugh as in the old days

People complaining just don’t get it and that’s ok

I wonder if part of it (not accusing people in this thread of this, but perhaps other people that grouse about the show fall under this umbrella) is the expectation that tv programs, movies, etc. should have didacticism at their kernel(s)? (comedy stuff, like standup material esp seems to fall under these expectations) Which gets weird because a. presumably we all learn how to treat others from a preschool age, do we really need refresher courses in this from by all things an industry that is notorious for giving us harvey weinstein et al? like taking ethical prompts from wall street urgings b. hbo has insanely lavish budgets to do shows like succession (which don't get me wrong, I love -- the show I mean, not necessarily the fact that so much money is dumped into its production) which would titillate with the repeated sequences of wealth porn but then does the "this may look glamorous but being rich is actually miserable just fyi". at least curb is sort of non-judgmentally amoral and respects the viewer enough to pass judgment or not as they might care to. and the larry character is obv a huge asshole, that's unambiguous thread running through the show. but also in a sense an everyperson, who gets as irrationally bothered and mega-pettily so by the same small irritations in life that the rest of us do... this post is muddled but my point is that I much prefer the curb approach to that of other shows which presume to have some substantive moral take when in reality the production team, others responsible might prove even scummier than the characters portrayed. like, cheryl hines might be married to dumbass crank rfk jr but at least she is not doing selfies with steve bannon/alex jones! heh...

The old ones were better. A lot better. "And that's ok." All TV shows nosedive eventually after 20 years.

Strongly feel that the show is done.

there are a couple other dud seasons but this was probably the worst one ever by quite a lot. yet there are great moments throughout that make it worth it; if he makes 5 more seasons at this level of quality i would consider myself lucky