Curb Your Enthusiasm - Season Seven

I was excited to see this season, because this is the one with the much anticipated Seinfeld reunion. However - and this is only good news in retrospect after watching the entire season - it sort of takes a back seat to the regular Curb shenanigans. It wouldn't be entirely accurate to call it "The Seinfeld Season", because the reunion stuff is only present for about half of the episodes, and the reunion itself is seen in maybe two of them. But that is the very nature of the concept; Larry wanted a unique way to do a Seinfeld reunion without it being exploitative and lame like other reunion shows are, and so while it is a running storyline throughout the season, it's not the focus of it.

To me, season five has been the funniest season so far, but this one comes very close. While I am a Seinfeld fan, I thought all of the non-Seinfeld segments were funnier than any of the Seinfeld ones, but I can't say it wasn't cool seeing the characters back again. No reference was made to their time in prison, but the new scenes were perhaps meant to serve as more of a finale replacement, even though they do take place many years later. The original finale served as a better ending to the series, though, because the Curb one just felt like a regular episode done in modern day, and not an ending at all. Anyway, apart from that, this season was more of Larry's mistakes, misunderstandings, and offenses, which is always comedy gold. I don't recall it in previous seasons, but they seem to have started an arc where Jeff is regularly cheating on Susie. It makes me like him less, but then it is Susie. And I wasn't really a fan of the scene with Larry trying to convince Michael Richards to do the reunion while Michael is distracted by nude artistic photos on the restaurant walls, because it didn't seem to really go anywhere other than later having Michael be slightly surprised that a reunion is happening. It was an anticlimactic payoff. But it was fantastic to see Phillip Baker Hall return as Larry's doctor, Catherine O'Hara as Marty Funkhouser's crazy sister, and a really pointless but funny cameo by Ben Affleck in a role that would have been played by an extra, because all he did was walk by.

Best Episode: I think the first two episodes were among the funniest ("Funkhouser's Crazy Sister" and "Vehicular Fellatio"), and I really enjoyed "The Black Swan" for its crazy murder cover-up story, but I'd say overall the most satisfying was probably "Officer Krupke", in which Larry has his pants stolen, offends some kids who make bad lemonade, covers for Jeff with a silly lie, suspects Cheryl of participating in a threesome without him, and encounters a cop named after a character in a musical. Also, Ben Affleck walks by.