Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Series (DVD Review)
- Review Date: Apr 09, 2025
- Format: DVD
-
Director
VariousRelease Date(s)
1999-2024 (October 8, 2024)Studio(s)
HBO/Production Partners (Warner Bros. Discovery Home Entertainment)- Film/Program Grade: A-
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: A-
Review
Frequently hilarious, Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm (1999-2024) builds on the comic sensibilities of Seinfeld (1989-1998), unencumbered by network Standards & Practices, the program first airing on HBO. It’s a series best enjoyed methodically, in smaller doses versus the bingeability of Seinfeld insofar as it revolves around a single character, rather than Seinfeld’s more varied four (Jerry, Elaine, George, and Kramer). A little of Larry David goes a long way.
The ingenious for-the-time premise (much imitated since) has Larry David, co-creator and co-head writer of the wildly popular Seinfeld, playing a fictionalized version of himself, initially married to Cheryl (Cheryl Hines) and managed by best friend Jeff Greene (Jeff Garlin), Jeff married to overbearing, foul-mouthed wife Susie (Susie Essman). Living in Los Angeles, Larry tests the patience of longtime friends, including comedians Richard Lewis and Wanda Sykes, and actors like married couple Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, likewise playing fictional versions of themselves. Others play wholly fictional roles, including Shelley Berman as Nat, Larry’s aged father; Richard Kind as Larry’s cousin Andy; and Bob Einstein as Larry’s sanctimonious friend Marty Funkhouser. In season six, J.B. Smoove joins the regular cast as Leon, part of a large displaced family Cheryl and a reluctant Larry take in following Hurricane Katrina.
Virtually all of the show’s humor is derived from the fictional Larry’s self-centered and anal obsessions: in constantly questioning/challenging social conventions, often trivial matters like “Is if okay to take food from a friend’s refrigerator without asking?” Larry is tactlessly critical of others for not adhering to his personal standards and adverse to acknowledging his own shortcomings and failures. Completely unfiltered, he will go to extreme lengths to prove his point, and essentially incapable of letting go to any grievance or annoyance, invariably upsetting everyone in his orbit.
Part of what makes Curb Your Enthusiasm so funny is that there’s usually some merit to Larry’s complaints, such as arcane rules of doctor’s visits, restaurant reservations and tipping, etc., and Larry’s “wrap rage,” trying to open stubbornly unwrappable plastic packaging, often variations of material previously mined in Seinfeld. Curb, however, takes the humor to more extreme levels. Larry David may have been the inspiration for George Costanza, but on Curb Larry often out-Georges George.
In one episode, for example, Larry is at home with a TiVo repairman when his wife, Cheryl, calls him from a flight experiencing violent turbulence. Terrified, she calls Larry essentially to say goodbye in the event her plane crashes. Larry, however, is upset because he can’t find the TiVo remote, and keeps interrupting her to ask where she put it. A season 5 story arc has lifelong friend Richard Lewis needing a kidney transplant and, when Larry’s turns out to be a match, Larry hopes Richard’s cousin, in a coma, dies first so he won’t have to go through with it. In a later show, Larry schemes to get out of helping his girlfriend get through chemotherapy because he doesn’t want to give up his weekly golf game.
Sometimes, though, Larry is merely a “victim of circumstance,” in the tradition of the Three Stooges. In a very funny early episode, at a party Larry innocently wanders into a little girl’s room, she asking him to cut the hair of an expensive doll. After do so, the girl is horrified to learn that the doll’s hair won’t grow back, resulting in much hysteria by the appalled family and Larry’s Byzantine efforts to replace it. In another show, Larry is stuck in typical L.A. gridlock, trying to get to a Dodgers game, when he hits upon the idea of hiring a prostitute not for sex but to enable him to legally use the carpool lane. Likewise, in a later season the community is in an uproar about a convicted sex offender who has moved into the neighborhood, but the man loves Seinfeld and helps Larry with his golf swing, so he invites him over for Passover.
Some of the Jewish-related humor provides Curb Your Enthusiasm’s best moments. At a party to celebrate his 10th wedding anniversary, Larry’s rabbi (Barry Gordon) asks if he could bring “a survivor.” Figuring fellow survivors might want to interact, he and Cheryl also invite Solly, a Holocaust victim friend of Larry’s father. But the rabbi’s “survivor” turns out to be from Survivor: The Australian Outback and, incredibly, the young athletic man insists his TV-show trials were far harsher than anything at the concentration camp. (“We didn’t have snacks!”)
Eventually, Larry’s colleagues from Seinfeld appear, in a season-arc story involving a proposed reunion show, which the always-resistant Larry suddenly wants to do because he thinks by casting Cheryl (who left him after the TiVo incident) as George Costanza’s ex-wife, he’ll win her back.
Though constructed almost entirely around the Larry David character, the often-dazzling array of regulars and guest stars are funny on their own. Jeff Garlin is especially good throughout the program’s run, playing Larry’s laid-back manager, who almost always agrees with Larry’s opinions and provides tacit support of his outrageous schemes. Is this because he’s Larry’s friend or Larry’s highly-paid manager? Jeff (the character) is himself completely unscrupulous, happy to engage in impromptu affairs (once with Marty Funkhouser’s severely mentally ill sister, brilliantly played by Catherine O’Hara) and other hilarious salaciousness.
Ted Danson also makes a great straight man, he and wife Mary Steenburgen exaggerated pillars of the celebrity community. In one episode, Larry attends a ceremony after making a large donation to a hospital, a wing named after him, only to be upstaged by Danson, who has donated his new wing as “Anonymous,” even though everyone in attendance knows it’s him. The differences in their approach to everything manifests in “The Freak Book,” in which Larry decides to give Danson a wildly inappropriate coffee table book about freaks as a birthday present, bringing along his alcoholic chauffeur to the party. Danson and Steenburgen are polite but appalled at the gift, which Larry can’t help but loudly guffaw over with the drunken chauffeur until Danson kicks them out.
Curb Your Enthusiasm comes in a single DVD case, about two-and-a-half times thicker than a single disc snap version, all inside a fairly sturdy cardboard slipcase. The 24 DVDs are stacked on top of one another, two to a spindle, but the design seems to protect the discs from scratching reasonably well. The discs themselves appear identical to previous single-season releases, complete with ads for other HBO and Warner Bros. shows on the first disc of each season. The 12-season, 120 episodes across nearly 25 years results in various format changes and audio/subtitle options: seasons 1-6 are 4:3 standard format with Dolby Digital 2.0 stereo sound, while seasons 7-12 are 1.78:1 enhanced widescreen with Dolby Digital 5.1 sound. French audio is available on seasons 1-5, and 7-9, but not the others. English subtitles are available on all 12 seasons, but only 1-9 for Spanish and French. The discs are Region 1 encoded.
Special features include A Seinfeld Moment on Curb: Interview with Larry David and the Seinfeld Cast, Leon’s Guide to NYC, Larry’s Favorite Episodes, behind-the-scenes of the final scene, and a gag reel, among other scattered supplements from previous releases.
One of the precious few great American television comedies of the last 25 years, Curb Your Enthusiasm provides plenty of big laughs.
- Stuart Galbraith IV