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.

Curb Your Enthusiasm - Season Six

The sixth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm has Larry taking in a black family (also literally named the Blacks) who were left homeless after a hurricane. As Susie Essman puts it on the DVD's special features, "There's just something about putting Larry with black people that is always funny." (not an exact quote, but close enough.) I didn't directly think about it until she said it, but I'd have to agree. I don't want to sound like I'm stereotyping, but Larry David is pretty much the opposite of a black person in every way, and putting two opposites together is a tried and true foundation for comedy. The season's other, smaller arc involves Larry and Cheryl separating, which opens up a lot of doors for us to see his attempts at dating. We know by now that Larry is not romantic, nor is he selfless, so once again we get comedy by way of opposites. Not to say that he's entirely horrible at it, though. He was effective in using humour to at least obtain dates in the first place.

The season didn't entirely start off strong, if only because the first episode was kind of predictable, and I think I would have to say that season five was funnier overall (it's been too long now since I've watched one to four), but I mean if you're already a fan of Curb Your Enthusiasm, you're going to keep enjoying every season because it's more or less consistent in bringing more of the same old Larry David without getting tiring or unfunny. The fact that season five may have been funnier does not reflect poorly on season six, because it was still a funny batch of episodes, and Larry's ability to call people on their BS every single time will never not be fun to watch.

Best Episode: "The Freak Book", in which a book of deformed people causes Larry to disrupt several parties and gatherings, and Larry finds himself doing some work as a limo driver.

Curb Your Enthusiasm - Season Five

Since season 2, Curb Your Enthusiasm has made use of season-length story arcs. This one had two: Larry's friend Richard Lewis needing a kidney transplant while Larry, who is a match, desperately tries to find someone else to do it so he doesn't have to give up his own kidney; and Larry hiring a private investigator (played by Mekhi Phifer) to find out if he is adopted after his sick father tells him as much. Both of these storylines offered a lot of funny encounters that are the show's staple, and in the season finale they tied together nicely so that the season began and ended with Larry having near-death experiences.

I think the reason Curb fans love the show (and, to a lesser extent, Seinfeld as well) is for its honesty about human flaws. Larry can be selfish and dishonest a lot of the time, but he is our hero because he doesn't take it lying down when other people exhibit these qualities or when he is caught in an unfortunate misunderstanding. As the season 5 poster suggests, we are all like him in some way, even if we don't want to admit it. If you find neurotic people annoying then you might not enjoy this show, but I find it funny and entertaining, even if a little bit predictable at times because the plots are written in the style Larry David used on Seinfeld where things come full circle at the end of the episode. And since George Costanza was based on Larry David, I sort of think of this show as a documentary about George.

Best Episode: "Kamikaze Bingo", not just for its awesome title, but because I found it to be the funniest. Larry insults a Japanese man by making fun of his father, who was a kamikaze pilot in the war but didn't actually complete any suicide runs, and accuses an old woman of cheating at Bingo.