It’s pretty sad! HBO’s twelve-season run of Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm has officially ended after 120 fairly well-executed episodes. It has become difficult to distinguish between the real Larry David and the TV character because the co-creator of Seinfeld has made a career out of playing an exaggerated version of himself.
Curb Your Enthusiasm’s long-awaited, 53-minute series finale offers fans even more laughs, some well-timed cameos, and a hint at another finale that fans may have been predicting since the season’s opening episode.
So it’s no surprise that the show’s director, Jeff Schaffer, claimed that the final episode was a direct response to all the Seinfeld haters out there.
Ending of Curb Your Enthusiasm: A Defiant Nod to Seinfeld Critics
The heavier-handed and more intense Larry David’s version of Curb Your Enthusiasm said this at the end-of-season finale:
“I’m 76 years old, and I have never learned a lesson in my entire life!”
Given that Seinfeld’s finale featured the phrase “no hugging, no learning,” this fact should also have been very apparent to viewers of that show. Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld), Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), George (Jason Alexander), and Kramer (Michael Richards) received a year in prison for their inaction when they witnessed a man being carjacked in the highly criticized series finale.
Before the jury rendered its decision, the nine seasons of the show featured testimonies from people who had been wronged by the above four. Meanwhile, David was on trial on Curb Your Enthusiasm for allegedly breaking Georgia’s ‘Election Integrity Act’ by giving Leon’s aunt a bottle of water while she was in line to cast her vote. This is similar to how the Seinfeld series finale was structured.
Director, writer, and executive producer Jeff Schaffer discussed how the ending was “a big middle finger” to Seinfeld haters (via USA Today):
“This whole thing came from (us) talking about a little story where Larry doesn’t want to get caught up in a kid’s lesson… We’re commenting not just on ‘Seinfeld’ or ‘Curb’, but on Larry. On Larry sticking a big middle finger at everyone who didn’t like the ‘Seinfeld’ finale going, ‘Hey, you know what? I’ve never learned a lesson in my life. I don’t care what you thought. I’m doing it again.’”
Well, was there anyone who felt remorseful about Seinfeld’s ending? For Schaffer, this was never the case. He never had a problem with the ending, because
“I thought it was funny.”
In other words, he’s not going to pander to the Seinfeld fans who were showing hatred toward the show’s ending.
Analyzing the Anger: What Made the Seinfeld Finale So Infuriating?
The Seinfeld series finale aired on May 14, 1998, and it has been more than 25 years since then. Some of the 76.3 million viewers were upset about it, as per a report by Variety. And even many of its detractors detested the controversial finale.
For making the main characters “pay for all their years of selfishness, self-absorption, immaturity, and greed”, Entertainment Weekly rated the series’ finale a C-and called Larry David a “spiteful, unforgiving moralist”.
Even Jerry Seinfeld expressed a little regret about the controversial ending. He shared (via Vulture):
“I sometimes think we really shouldn’t have even done it. There was a lot of pressure on us at that time to do one big last show, but big is always bad in comedy.”
It is even more brilliant that Larry David brought that ending back for a reshoot because he has hinted that the negative response to the Seinfeld finale may have relieved some of the pressure on him to finish Curb Your Enthusiasm. In 2014, he told Grantland:
“I got so much grief from the ‘Seinfeld’ finale, which a lot of people intensely disliked, that I no longer feel a need to wrap things up.”
He added that he thought it was “clever” that every character would return for the final trial. Evidently, the ploy was more successful this time around. How? Because, as of this writing, No Lessons Learned has the highest rating of any Curb Your Enthusiasm episode on IMDb.
You can stream Curb Your Enthusiasm on Max. Meanwhile, Seinfeld is available on Netflix.
