Curb Your Enthusiasm: Larry David's comedy ends after 12 series

The satirical comedy series Curb Your Enthusiasm came to a close on Sunday, with a finale marking the highlights of the show's 12 seasons.

The HBO series stars Larry David as an exaggerated version of himself – a semi-retired television writer and producer based in Los Angeles.

In its review of the final season, Empire described the comedy as “always in the TV Comedy Hall of Fame.”

But the AV Club said the final episode was “no surprises.”

The first installment of Cub Your Enthusiasm concluded in 2011, but the series resumed six years later. In total, there were 120 episodes.

“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 constantly pushing boundaries.” Variety's Daniel Daddario wrote.

“He has done a solid, if not always optimally elegant, job of tracking trending dinner party themes over two decades. The show's fast-paced nature — with its entirely improvised conversations built around the loose outlines of the plot — has effectively invented a category of entertainment, But it also means that display is, by its very nature, a blunt instrument.

“Larry and his friends are crazy funny, live out loud, and play games of one-upmanship that are truly a joy to watch. But they are rarely crafty.”

The basic structure of each episode's plot and subplot was written by David, but the show's dialogue is largely improvised by the actors.

The overarching story line of the final season was the continued uncertainty over Larry accidentally violating Georgia's election laws.

In the courtroom, the season finale saw several characters who had previously appeared in the series appear to testify, a device that helped recall popular storylines over the years.

But in a review published earlier in the season, Empire was suggested by Boyd Hilton The show culminated in scenes that didn't necessarily serve the overall plot.

“It's a measure of how willing David is to extract anything and everything for comedic effect that some of the funniest scenes this season occur when David is just a vessel of impotent rage, towards inanimate objects or unwitting service industry workers,” he said. .

“These specific scenes don't really go anywhere, nor do they need to. The show still makes time for some purely silly comedy, and I thank heavens for that.”

A series of celebrities, news anchors and other guest stars from the show appeared to bid farewell to the show.

The ending also included multiple references to the television comedy Seinfeld, which David co-created, including an appearance by Jerry Seinfeld himself.

Korb's conclusion included several nods to the criticism David received in Seinfeld's final episode in the late 1990s.

One subplot saw Larry's friend Leon (J.P. Smoove) finally stick around to watch Seinfeld, creating a vehicle that allowed him to interrogate Larry about how it ended.

Their conversation, in turn, gave Larry an opportunity to indirectly address the criticism around that series, and in the end he said the line: “I'm not really interested in your opinion.”

final episode review, CNN's Brian Lowry said: “Obviously David earned the right from HBO, creatively, to say goodbye on his terms and, yes, not have to worry about the backlash.

“However, it was nice to see in the plot of Seinfeld that David could laugh not only at himself but at what many have long viewed as one of his few obvious mistakes.

“All in all, as Larry likes to say, the result was pretty nice and, in fact, a little better than that. And while Larry made a point in the episode by saying he'd never learned anything in his life, ranking this on the scale of series finales might suggest otherwise “

“With everything leading up to this big Election Integrity Act/water bottle trial all season long, we all knew that 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' would end with Larry on trial, just as Seinfeld did in its 1998 two-part finale,” she wrote.

“This was inevitable, but there were some variables at play as well: 1) whether our man would be found guilty and go to prison, and 2) which of Larry's sins from the previous season would come up to incriminate the man.

“Is the fan service fun? Sure, it's fine. And the court thing is a convenient tool to collect clips from seasons 1-12 to give the show a nostalgic feel (which is why Seinfeld did it first, of course).”…but the thing is “This episode revolved so much around the Seinfeld finale that it seemed a bit predictable and devoid of much surprise.”

“While I was watching, I felt something strange,” he said. “It wasn't the occasional comedic glitch that bothered me. It wasn't the feeling that the end of Curb signaled the end of something more than the show itself; the Yiddishkeit of immigrants and children of immigrants' version of Jewish humor had been on the wane for a long time.

“No, what was wrong was the timing, and the misery of the moment. It was difficult to think about the finale of “Curb,” or rewatch the episode “Palestinian Chicken,” amid the cruelty and carnage of the past six months.

“The comedy of manners plays with the conventions of civilization, and can lose its charm when civilization yields to barbarism. In life, as in comedy, timing is essential.”