So Curb Your Enthusiasm came back, after a fairly lengthy hiatus of six years. It's a weird length of time to be gone, six years. On one hand, its nowhere near the length of time that shows like The X-Files or Will and Grace were off the air before getting their reboots, and Curb has taken multiple-year breaks for half of its run now. On the other hand, the world moves very quickly, and the landscape - both TV and political - that Curb came back to in 2017 was very much not the one it left in 2011. It's always been a show that lacks the mass appeal Seinfeld had, but it was also an iconic trendsetter of sorts in the 2000s. This is, and always has been, a show about an upper-middle-aged rich guy with an assload of opinions and no social graces, no verbal filter. It's about a man who is constantly being berated by people for the actions he's taken, and in turn screaming right back at them. Everyone on the show is an asshole, much like on Seinfeld, and I find myself siding both with and against the Larry David character in equal measure. The show has always been heavily improvised, lending it an air of authenticity that helps carry it through some of its more outlandish and farfetched plots.
That said, I think this is a classic example of when a show (or a band, or a video game, or a screenwriter or director or whoever) becomes an instant and iconic success early on, but then eventually no longer fits into the new world it helped usher in. This happens all the time - look again at The X-Files reboot. That six-episode run was by and large maligned by fans and critics last year, but you know what? I don't think it was really all that different from the X-Files show that went off the air fifteen years ago! I didn't see it or anything, but I did watch the first three seasons of The X-Files a couple of years ago, and man, what a cheesy and underbaked and one-note show that was. I don't doubt that it was iconic and revolutionary in, like, 1993. But the same X-Files tone and pace and creativity that blew people's minds in the '90s felt woefully silly in 2016.
All of this is to say - I still liked the ninth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. It's a show I was glad to have back, even if only out of familiarity and comfort. But the once-unique tone and wittiness of Curb have been aped and expanded on and tweaked and surpasses by like a dozen other shows in the past decade. This season just felt a little bit stale by comparison. The same old beats were here, and it just didn't play as well for me in 2017 as it did in, like, 2006. Part of that I'm sure is just me being older and having moved on and grown, but also part of it is that there's so much less appeal in seeing rich old white people screaming at each other in 2017 than there was in 2006. And I mean - look, it's impressive as hell that Lin-Manuel Miranda, arguably the guy with the most options in the world in 2017, chose to come to Curb Your Enthusiasm for a three-episode arc. It speaks to Larry David's influence and pull, absolutely. And it's maybe even more amazing that he was willing to make himself look like a huge asshole - something you just have to do on Curb, whether you're Lin-Manuel Miranda or Ted Danson or Julia Louis-Dreyfus. But at the end of the day, it all felt very familiar, a lot like a "Greatest Hits" album, almost. Larry disrespects the troops by forgetting to thank them for their service. Larry breaks up two engaged lesbians because he tells them they have the bride-and-groom roles backwards in his eyes. Larry gets a fatwa put on him by the Ayatollah for mocking him on a late night talk show. (Okay, fine, that last one's something new in scope - and it's also the impetus for this ninth season. But still!)
I guess at the end of the day, I can't help but notice how the return of Curb Your Enthusiasm barely registered. Part of that is that there's just too much television these days, but there are other shows whose returns would feel a little more momentous and meaningful, I think - looking at (for?) you, Arrested Development Season 5.
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