Larry David doesn’t know when to stop. Obviously this is true of his fictionalised incarnation, but it’s also increasingly true of the real Larry David – the comedy genius who has, over the course of an amazing career, reinvented the sitcom not once but twice.



Given its initial strangeness, Curb Your Enthusiasm has been remarkably influential. Because variations on the format are part of the language of television now, it’s easily forgotten how original the show seemed when it started. Subsequently, everyone from Jack Dee to Michael Barrymore and David Hasselhoff has tried something vaguely – or indeed embarrassingly – approximate. So now, it’s just another sitcom. In any field of creative enterprise, pioneers are doomed to fall back into the pack as everyone else catches up. Curb still deserves kudos for being there first.

But Curb wasn’t just the original; it was the best. There’s an exquisite agony about the finest episodes that stem from the suspicion that everything happening to Larry could probably happen to you on a particularly bad day. For all the conspicuous prosperity of the setting and the cameos from famous faces, the situations remain remarkably universal. Clearly wealth and success don’t preclude regular moments of social catastrophe.

But here’s the problem. Larry was usually if not right exactly, then at least wrong in a way that felt plausible if you were in possession of all the facts. The Larry David of Curb is an idiot, and a magnificently unlucky one too. He is hugged by a child seconds after he’s hidden a bottle of water down his trousers. He has a friend who won’t pay restaurant bills and a doctor who helps himself to drinks from his fridge. Larry is also an honest man, a man who’ll say what we’re all thinking. So when he told the son of a former kamikaze pilot that, by rights, he shouldn’t be alive, he hit the nail gloriously on the head.

Larry now feels too much like a rich, straight white man shoving his demented privilege in everyone’s face … Curb. Photograph: HBO

The essential rightness of Larry wasn’t just crucial in making him a relatable character. It also underpinned the stunningly precise construction of the best episodes, the inexorable internal logic to those half-hours in which every mishap gathers momentum and leads horrifyingly and perfectly to the next. They’re like a perfectly calibrated Swiss watch of hideous social awkwardness.



And now, Curb’s imperial period brilliance shines more brightly than ever. Because everything has changed. In this eagerly awaited new season, Larry is just a dick. He will tell a lesbian who is planning her wedding that she’s too butch to be the bride, and will persist long past the point it becomes clear that he’s jeopardising her relationship. He’ll see a woman in a short skirt, assume she’s a sex worker and tell her so. He’ll behave pedantically, rudely and awkwardly, simply because that’s what his character does. This doesn’t just make Larry impossible to root for, it coarsens the comedy; wedges a spanner into the narrative works.

Curb is now a slapstick-and-catchphrase sitcom. In the opening episode, there’s a moment where he simply throws his head back and bellows “prettay PRETTAY GOOD!” It’s a crass, foregrounded, overplayed moment that feels as if it’s escaped from a particularly lazy episode of Little Britain rather than one of the most innovative sitcoms of all time. Because Larry’s behaviour is now so consistently appalling, the gags are all obvious a mile off. The naturalistic, near-deadpan feel of early seasons has been replaced by a clunking, almost slapstick predictability – the emergence, in episode two, of a scantily clad prostitute just as Larry is Skyping a Muslim cleric felt more like Benny Hill than classic Curb.

Maybe the world has changed without telling Larry David. Maybe Larry now simply feels too much like a rich, straight white man lumbering around shoving his demented, free-ranging privilege and entitlement in everyone’s face? But was it too much to ask that his last trick might be to leave us wanting more? Apparently so. Enthusiasm? Well and truly curbed.