Major spoilers below for the series finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm, so be warned if you haven’t yet watched on HBO or via Max subscription.
Rarely does a TV finale go for broke in the way that HBO’s long-running cringe-fest Curb Your Enthusiasm did with its swan song. (Which, not coincidentally, featured flashback scenes of Larry clubbing a black swan in Season 7.) Co-creators Larry David and Jeff Schaffer pulled off an immaculate television reception by using Curb’s final episode as a mirror-verse tribute to Seinfeld’s infamously polarizing conclusion, which changed David’s views on the medium.
The super-sized “No Lessons Learned” was cameo-filled ambrosia from start to finish, and paid off on both the Georgia Election law narrative and the Seinfeld finale riffs that started in the premiere, wrapping on a perfectly timeless bookend. So it was quite the shock to learn from Jeff Schaffer that the season wasn’t initially geared to be such a self-reflective exercise in metanarratives. And that final scene also has a fun story behind it, which we’ll get into below.
The Original Goal Wasn't For This To Be A Seinfeld-Infused Final Season
The impetus of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s final stretch came from fish-out-of-water Larry getting in trouble for a relatively new local law, which feels like it was already being tailor-made as a direct callback to the Seinfeld quartet’s arrest under the Good Samaritan law. But that notion wasn’t present when the creative process started for Season 12, as I learned from Jeff Schaffer, who said:
We started writing the season, and we knew we were going to do the Georgia law stuff. We knew we were gonna get Larry arrested for that, and one of the ways that could go is a court appearance. But we weren't necessarily thinking we were going to end in court. We weren't aiming towards anything yet; we were just sort of writing as we go and feeling it out. It was July of '22, so we'd been writing for three or four months, and we were talking about a story where Larry doesn't want to get involved in a kid's lesson: 'I don't need to be involved in the lesson. I don't need to learn anything. He learned something. I've never learned anything in my life.'
To be sure, while that notion did end up making it into the finale — for a hotel lobby scene in which a young boy accidentally bopped Larry in the head with a ball — that wasn't the original intention for it. It was just talking about how stubborn and immovable the character is as far as personalities go.
But once that ball started rolling, it wound up in a magical place where Schaffer and David realized that the character's inability to evolve allowed for a perfect prism through which "The Finale" could be returned to. He continued:
As Larry and I were sort of talking through that scenario, we talked about how Larry's never learned anything, which we joked about before. I mean, it's pretty obvious. It's baked into the show that Larry doesn't learn anything. Also that Susie's never learned anything, because she keeps inviting him to dinner parties, but that's a different story. So it sort of hit us, 'Hey, if we just megaphone the fact that Larry's never learned a lesson, we can go right at the trial and redo the Seinfeld finale.'
I can only imagine how many light bulbs started bursting open once they tapped into that idea. Because this isn't merely a case of art imitating and poking fun at life, as it went with Lori Loughlin's scandal-referencing appearance earling in Season 12. There are other levels at play here that aren't so easily classified, but are still easy to appreciate.
- The Best Seinfeld Episodes, Ranked
- All The Characters Larry David Played On Seinfeld
- Every Seinfeld Joke That Has Been Reused In Curb Your Enthusiasm
Jeff Schaffer spoke to the complicated nature of Curb Your Enthusiasm holding a tongue-in-cheek middle finger up to those who have decried Seinfeld's ending, while also poking fun at Larry and Jerry in the process. In his words:
So we enjoyed this meta joke: 'You didn't like it before? I don't care. He doesn't care. He's doing it again. We're doing the Seinfeld finale all over again.' And there was something revolutionary about the constancy of that. There was something that was like, singular in the redundancy of that, and ultimately it made it about more than the show. It spoke to the contrary DNA of Larry, and that made it a fitting end to the series, because it was about also about the guy who created the series. Also, it's funny.
That's the true win here. If this was all a big complex storytelling exercise that didn't actually evoke any laughs, would it have felt as welcomed and worth it? Probably not. Thankfully, the ep was a hoot, with Auntie Rae's courtroom appearance being a definite highlight in that respect.
The Final Scene Was Already Conceived For A Previous Season
In many ways, Curb Your Enthusiasm's final moments are a perfect capsule of the show as a whole, featuring the core group of characters that fans have loved watching over the past 25 years, without any of them being truly happy and smiling except for maybe Ted Danson. But it turns out that slice of genius had already existed for years by the time the finale was being filmed.
Interesting trivia, that scene where they're fighting about the window shade, we shot that scene twice before in two other seasons. We shot that fight in Season 9; it was Episode 6, 'The Accidental Text on Purpose.' We shot it [in Season 10] on the flight down to Mexico for 'You're Not Going to Get Me to Say Anything Bad About Mickey.' And in each one, it was like an extra joke; we shot it, it was funny, but we just didn't need it. It was like, it just felt extra. But when we were looking for something, because we wanted to end on the whole group, we're like, 'Oh my god, this scene that is on the cutting board twice. It's the perfect way to end the show: ending with them doing what they do best, which is fighting with each other.
For all that Larry hasn't learned anything throughout all the years we've watched him, clearly none of the other characters made any swooping alterations with their own lifestyles, with Susie just as quick to rile him up as ever, and Jeff just as quick to take whoever's side is yelling loudest. As Schaffer put it:
Because you get the sense, 'Oh, they're gonna be doing this forever.'
Indeed, and the scene was made all the more enjoyable by having the late, great Richard Lewis also in the mix as much as he was throughout the entirety of Season 12. So good.
For now and perhaps for all time, Curb Your Enthusiasm has made us cringe for the last time. At least with new stories, since all 12 seasons are still around to make new generations of viewers uncomfortable until the end of time.
