Enthusiasm, curbed
After a 21-month hiatus, America's pettiest crank returned to HBO for a sixth season and only 1.17 million viewers showed up to watch. In contrast, the 2002 season opener of Curb Your Enthusiam drew 5.5 million viewers. Which just goes to show you how remarkable David Chase's reign at HBO really was. Not only was he able to get millions of viewers rooting for whiny bald sociopath Tony Soprano -- they stuck around to watch whiny bald sociopath Larry David too!
But now that Tony is no longer around to do Larry's dirty work for him, will Curb Your Enthusiasm survive? One option, of course, is simply to have Larry cut off Ted Danson's head. That would certainly attract some viewers, and, who knows, it might also be artistically fruitful too.
For nearly two decades, after all, starting with Seinfeld in 1989, then continuing through Curb Your Enthusiasm, David has pretty much stayed in his (dis)comfort zone. Every episode, he identifies a few social rules and conventions that no one has ever quite articulated or analyzed as astutely as he does, then he puts them into the service of seemingly unrelated plotlines that inevitably come together at the end. As in film noir, the action typically kicks off with a tiny and innocuous bad decision, and that bad decision always spirals into a major dilemma.
It's a sturdy comic formula that David has employed with a virtuoso touch -- and if he's ever short on mores and manners to deconstruct, he just invents new ones. In this season's first episode, for example, he and his wife Cheryl are supposed to attend a party at their acquaintance Marty Funkhauser's house, but Larry doesn't want to because Ted Danson is having a party the next night that he'd rather attend -- and he doesn't want to go to parties two nights in a row.
Instead of simply declining Funkhauser's invitation, however, Larry hatches a plan. He and Cheryl will show up the following night, have a laugh with Marty over the fact that they got the date wrong, then be on their way.
It's an ingenious bit of passive misanthropy, and even though it doesn't work quite as well as anticipated, it will no doubt become a common tactic amongst the public at large, and once again, the man whose famous Seinfeld mantra was "no hugging, no learning" has taught us all something useful.
Despite such utility, however, Curb Your Enthusiasm no longer seems quite as necessary as it once did. When the series debuted in 2000, it utilized much of Seinfeld's DNA but was different in substantial ways too. First, it was meaner and crasser, a fact that permitted it to create such classics as the "Beloved Aunt" episode. Second, it replaced hapless everyschlub George Costanza with a successful Hollywood millionaire.
In Hollywood, of course, there's no shortage of shows that stick up for the Little Guy. Curb went the opposite route and stuck up for the Big Guy, demonstrating in hilarious detail exactly how annoying it is to be filthy rich in a world that's mostly populated by belligerent shoe salesmen and rude hotel clerks.
But while David's determination to wear his heartlessness on his sleeve, consequences be damned, was a great joke at first, even great jokes lose their power over time. In the new season's first episode, there was a lot of bitching and moaning where there should have been punchlines, or at the very least, mob hits. Either way, you've got to give us a payoff of some kind; most of us get plenty of bitching and moaning at home.
A frequent contributor to Las Vegas Weekly, Greg Beato has also written for SPIN, Blender, Reason, Time.com, and many other publications. Email Greg at [email protected]