Curb Your Enthusiasm

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Template:Infobox television Curb Your Enthusiasm is an American television sitcom starring Seinfeld writer & co-creator Larry David. Since its 2000 series debut, the HBO show has enjoyed wide critical acclaim and a steadily growing, dedicated audience that has helped it emerge from early cult status. Through 2004, it has been nominated for twenty Emmy Awards (winning one) and has won a Golden Globe for best television comedy (2003). The series was inspired by a 1999 one-hour mockumentary titled Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm, which David and HBO had envisioned as a one-time project.

1 Concept
2 Characters
3 Plots
4 Trivia
5 External links

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Concept

Set in Los Angeles and loosely based on David’s life as a semi-retired millionaire in the world after Seinfeld, the series is often described as a more subversive take on that hit program’s “show about nothing” motif.

The latitude afforded by cable television allows David to employ a darker comic palette while exploring many of his stock themes: the banal idiosyncrasies of daily life, the quirky entanglements of personal relations, and over-the-top social snafus. Curb Your Enthusiasm weaves ironic stories around the minutiae of David’s sensitivities, his propensity for outrage, and misanthropic flouting of conventions — which turn out to reveal an unwitting knack for self-destructive behavior.

Shot on location with hand-held cameras, Curb Your Enthusiasm is produced unconventionally, eschewing traditional scripts in favor of detailed scene outlines from which actors improvise dialogue. Curb Your Enthusiasm develops ongoing story lines and in-jokes set around David’s interaction with his patient but put-upon wife (played by Cheryl Hines). Larry’s loyal manager Jeff Greene (played by Jeff Garlin) is always by his side through thick and thin. Jeff’s outburst-prone wife Susie (played by Susie Essman) has a tendency to see right through Larry and Jeff’s half-baked fiascos.

The show is punctuated between scenes with music orchestrated by Wendall J. Yuponce (first season), and from a music library company called Killer Tracks (seasons two to five). The bouncy opening and closing theme song (not mentioned in the credits) is “Frolic” by Luciano Michelini.

Though many scenarios are drawn from his own experiences, the real-life David has downplayed the notion that he is like the character portrayed onscreen. However, in a Bob Costas interview, he did say the Larry David of the show was the one he can’t be in real life due to his sensitivity to others and to social conventions. For example, he forbids characters in CYE to use insults that may personally offend the actors (for example calling Jeff Greene fat) unless the actor (in this case, Jeff Garlin) okays it.

Production on the show’s fifth season began in January 2005, with the season premiering on September 25 of that year. According to HBO Chairman and CEO Chris Albrecht, David was asked to make the episodes run less than thirty minutes. Upon receiving the first two new shows, Albrecht discovered that David had turned in episodes clocking in at 29 minutes, 59 seconds with credits [1].

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Characters

The show’s natural, quasi-documentary style — together with the fact that David and many other characters play “themselves” — have contributed to the show’s blurring of distinctions between fiction and reality, again echoing Seinfeld.

Larry David (as himself) — The star of the show. The rich but inept David has terrible luck in social situations (with a few notable exceptions) and is often on the losing end of heated confrontations with “the help” — waiters, retail clerks, secretaries, etc. Politically liberal but socially obtuse, Larry is sensitive to offending others (such as the handicapped), but often does so inadvertently. He is a perpetual victim of not only his own petty neuroses and stubborn intransigence, which render him incapable of admitting fault and accepting blame, but also of fate and circumstance (which seem to actively conspire against him) and, on occasion, the over-sensitivities and easily-offended natures (sometimes to a ridiculous degree) of those he happens to encounter.
Cheryl David (played by Cheryl Hines) — David’s wife. A foil for David, often exasperated by his eccentricities.
Jeff Greene (played by Jeff Garlin) — David’s manager. He doggedly sticks up for his client and friend. Among his character quirks is an obsession with sex, complete with hidden pornography collections and a string of infidelities.
Susie Greene (played by Susie Essman) — Jeff’s wife. Often reacts to Jeff and Larry's shenanigans with extensive profanity.

Guest stars frequently play key roles. Richard Lewis and Ted Danson often appear as Larry David’s friends, and Shelley Berman appears as his father. Others have included former Seinfeld stars Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, along with Martin Scorsese, Wanda Sykes, Rob Reiner, Alanis Morissette, Hugh Hefner, Kathy Griffin, David Schwimmer, Mel Brooks, and Ben Stiller. Most play themselves. Jerry Seinfeld made a non-speaking cameo appearance in the Season 4 finale. In Season 5, a new batch of guest stars appeared on the show, including: Mekhi Phifer, Rosie O’Donnell, George Lopez, Grant Rosenmeyer, Bea Arthur (who starred as Larry’s deceased mother), plus Dustin Hoffman and Sacha Baron Cohen, who starred as Larry’s guides in Heaven.

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Plots

With the exception of Season 1 (2000), seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm are linked by a single overarching plot. Larry took a similar approach on Seinfeld during seasons four and seven.

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Season 2 (2001) — Larry David pursues a new television project, first with Jason Alexander, and then Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The premise: an actor who starred in a famous television show (Seinfeld being the obvious reference point) finds it difficult to secure work because of the public’s strong association with their famous former character. David pitches the idea to initially receptive network executives who ultimately back away for a variety of reasons.
Season 3 (2002) — David joins a restaurant venture with a group of investors that includes Ted Danson. The season ends with the restaurant's grand opening.
Season 4 (2004) — David works with Mel Brooks, Ben Stiller and David Schwimmer to star on Broadway in The Producers. He also struggles to fulfill his wife's tenth anniversary present to him — a one-time-only sexual encounter with someone else.
Season 5 (2005) — Larry’s friend, comedian Richard Lewis, is in dire need of a kidney; out of sheer feelings of paranoid guilt, Larry offers one of his own kidneys to Richard if he cannot find a suitible donor in time. Larry then makes many concerted, ridiculous efforts in finding Richard a kidney donor, including frequent visits to Richard’s estranged, comatose cousin, in the hopes that he will pass away, resulting in a perfect kidney for Richard, and also befriending a heavily Orthodox Jew who happens to be the head of the kidney donation board. Larry also feels that he is adopted due to a misunderstood word his father said (and no longer remembers) while in the hospital; Larry hires a private investigator (ER’s Mekhi Phifer) to look into it.

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Little is known about whether the show will return for a sixth season. There has been much confusion over the title of last season’s finale episode, “The End”. No information has been disclosed from HBO or the show’s production companies. If they officially announce an end to production, it will be recognized for going out in a rather discreet manner.

In a recent recorded interview with the New York Times and WCBS, David explains that he is still deciding on whether or not to begin a season six. He notes that the fans are hard to please, which according to his tone, is the reason that it could return. He explained that it will be hard to gather enough material to match what he had previously accomplished. He was, however, leaning towards a sixth season.

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Trivia

The show’s theme song was discovered by Larry David while watching a bank advertisement years before the show was created. The song is called “Frolic” and was written by Italian composer Luciano Michelini (see Michelini’s official site).

In 2003, Juan Catalan, a resident of Los Angeles, was cleared of premeditated murder charges against a material witness (a crime eligible for capital punishment) after cut-out footage shot for the “Carpool Lane” episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm showed him and his daughter attending the Dodgers vs. Atlanta Braves baseball event some 20 miles from the crime scene. [2]

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