39 Curb Your Enthusiasm

HBO 2000-present

The unspoken theme of Curb is the fictionalized Larry David’s struggle to find something to do with his life that will live up to co-creating Seinfeld. But the actual David has somehow turned his follow-up show into a Seinfeld sequel, a remake of it, and a rebuttal to it, posing an argument that the show about nothing might have been even funnier if George Costanza had been fabulously wealthy and able to curse up a storm. All these years later, the familiar Seinfeldesque convergence of subplots at the end of episodes still pays huge comic dividends, whether the stories were familiar (like Jerry, Larry winds up befriending a key participant from the 1986 World Series) or wildly different (Larry hires a sex worker so he has an excuse to drive in the carpool lane and avoid freeway traffic). And if Curb has proved more uneven than its predecessor, its best moments (say, Larry’s love of Palestinian chicken and wild sex conflicting with his pride in his Jewish heritage) surpass even Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer at their peak.