For the first few episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm's fourth season, I just wasn't feeling it. Larry David was inexplicably cast in a Broadway production of The Producers
along with Ben Stiller, and from the start of the season the two co-stars just
couldn't stand each other. It lacked the relatable annoyances of Seinfeld, or the more over-the-top arguing of Always Sunny,
and simply felt like a lot of bickering without many jokes. I was
considering how to put together a post detailing why I thought Seinfeld was just clearly a better show. And yet, once Ben Stiller finally left the Producers (and Curb Your Enthusiasm),
the show quickly rebounded and I ended up loving the back half of this
season. Standout episodes include The Carpool Lane (Larry takes a
prostitute to a Dodgers game), Wandering Bear (hijinks ensue after Larry
tries to buy a porn video) and the one-hour finale, a first for the
series, Opening Night where the season-long punchline is finally
revealed on stage. I don't know if I'll ever like Curb more than Seinfeld- I just like the characters more in the latter, but Curb Your Enthusiasm's fourth season was a fun watch and I just may catch up before new Curb ever airs. There's going to be more, right?
"Carpool Lane" trivia - I forget the details, but some guy at that game was accused of a crime he didn't commit; the episode's raw footage showed him at that game, clearly, verifying his alibi. He dodged some severe prison time!
ReplyDeleteFor me, Curb only kept getting better. The first four seasons were fine - the fourth better than the first and all - but for me I never loved the show until the fifth. Here is that season's main arc's two-sentence description: "Larry's friend Richard Lewis gets very ill and requires a kidney transplant. Larry is a match, but spends the season looking for other sources of a kidney for Lewis." It's as good as it sounds.