Larry David’s misanthrope set to bow out on a high
Twenty-plus years is a long time for any television comedy to hang around. In this, if in nothing else, Curb Your Enthusiasm (Sky Comedy) has something in common with Last of the Summer Wine. But as it embarks on a 12th season, time has been called. Perhaps Larry David has finally run out of social conventions to kick against.
The first episode of the show’s valedictory lap yielded an almost sentimental mea culpa. “I’ve been expecting more from myself my whole life and it’s just not there,” Larry shrugged. “I’ve ruined every party I have ever gone to my entire life. I have bad energy.”
This charming confession was extracted towards the end of an episode in which Larry mingles at a party in Atlanta as a celebrity guest, payment being contingent upon cordial behaviour. Naturally he violates the terms of the contract and finds himself negotiating with the African – as in white South African – squillionaire who has withheld the money.
“I really did the best under the circumstances of a person who hates people and yet had to be amongst them,” explains Larry, coaxed into a Truth and Reconciliation Commission cosplay. “I don’t like myself!” It’s taken only 24 years for him to admit it – 35 if we accept that David’s brand of neurotic antisocial rage was initially incarnated in the character of Seinfeld’s (misleadingly gentile) George Costanza.
Maybe not every episode of Curb has reached the very heights. But the show’s cumulative brilliance is unarguable. Is it time to go? On this evidence David may well be retiring before he suffers a coronary. To perform a crescendoing meltdown when Siri can’t give him directions in his car looks like very hard work.
If the deafness of Siri is an obvious trigger point, there are subtler ones too. Take the waiter whose slow service is caused by a very recent bereavement. “He gets a condolence tip,” says Larry, cynical cogs instantly a-whirr. The perils of the butt-dial are also discussed, setting up a lovely pay-off involving a wayward emotional-support dog.
The episode keeps trowelling on the punishments. Having suffered the vengeance of Latino room service, Larry is arrested by burly white police officers for giving water to an elderly black woman queuing to vote. Thus David deftly skewers the absurdity of the 2021 Election Integrity Act, widely seen in Georgia as a Republican ploy to thwart the black vote. This misfit still has his teeth. Jasper Rees
If you are in the depths of parenting misery – a baby who won’t sleep, a toddler who acts up, or the double whammy of both at the same time, perhaps with the added bonus of trying to hold down a full-time job while you’re at it – then you could do worse than watch Katherine Ryan: Parental
Guidance (W). Not because it has any useful advice, but because it will provide you with a few bleak laughs.
Ryan is a stand-up comedian and this series is ostensibly about her “meeting families who inspire me with their out-of-the-box parenting ideas”. First of these was Luisa Zissman, who once appeared on The Apprentice and now lives in a mansion with a stuffed horse in the living room. She has not one but two nannies, working on a rota, including Saturdays and Sundays. “I don’t suffer from mum guilt at all. I’m quite a selfish person,” she explained.
Ryan herself has a two-year-old son who still wakes for milk three times a night, and a seven-month-old baby, in addition to a teenage daughter. She has been breastfeeding for two years, is back to work on the stand-up circuit and is, understandably, tired. But she also has a nanny plus a stay-at-home husband, called Bobby, who wears the haunted look of a man who fears divorce in his future. He sleeps in one bedroom with the toddler, she sleeps with the baby.
The show is really an “At Home with the Ryans” reality TV affair, featuring the Canadian comedian’s brutally deadpan delivery. That makes it entertaining if you’re a Ryan fan – and she drops in that she gets “six million listeners a year” to her podcast – but also gives everything an air of being performed for the cameras. When Ryan invites no-nonsense nanny Brenda Hart to come over and talk about sleep training, you don’t believe they have any intention of hiring her.
If you’re not a fan, you might have less sympathy for a rich woman who doesn’t have a 9-5 job and can afford full-time help; there is something rather unpleasant about the way the Filipina nanny, Miriam, appears in shot while Ryan speaks about her but not to her. Anita Singh
Curb Your Enthusiasm ★★★★ Katherine Ryan: Parental Guidance ★★