What do you do after creating one of the most successful television programs in history? For Larry David, you continue with your craft, creating HBO’s longest running show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, called Curb colloquially. Curb’s final season, season 12, is currently airing on HBO. The subheading of the final season’s promotional poster reads, “The last of his kind.”
Curb, which has been airing since 2000, follows Seinfeld, which David famously co-created and wrote. The show has not changed much since its inception, with David starring as a version of himself — typically socially polarizing and observant to the minute details of life around him. The show’s premise is selected from written memories and occurrences that David physically stores in his office. However, the true strength of Curb lies within its cast. As David has said the show is not scripted, instead there is a general idea for a scene, and how it should start and resolve. Other than that, it is up to the performers to improvise the rest. Curb may very well be the last of its kind, a hit sit-com that relies on improv running for almost 25 years.
Within the modern media landscape, Curb has remained a constant reminder of why the 80s and 90s had so much success with long-running sitcom series. They are full of authenticity, with enough episodes for you to feel immersed in the lives of the characters. Although there are a handful of comedians, like Dave Chappelle or Ricky Gervais, who claim to have faced so much insurmountable backlash that they can only deem how “cancelled” they are on their original Netflix stand-up comedy specials, the continued success of Curb offers a rebuttal to those who say that comedy in the modern landscape is a dangerous game. Much like Seinfeld, the beauty of the scenes within Curb is that you have probably felt or experienced what is currently happening on screen once before.
