+

Cookies on the Business Insider India website

Business Insider India has updated its Privacy and Cookie policy. We use cookies to ensure that we give you the better experience on our website. If you continue without changing your settings, we\'ll assume that you are happy to receive all cookies on the Business Insider India website. However, you can change your cookie setting at any time by clicking on our Cookie Policy at any time. You can also see our Privacy Policy.

Close
HomeQuizzoneWhatsappShare Flash Reads
 

'Curb Your Enthusiasm' ends with a perfect 'Seinfeld' send-up — here's what happened

Apr 9, 2024, 05:13 IST
Insider
Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David in the series finale of "Curb Your Enthusiasm."John Johnson/HBO
  • The series finale of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" aired on Sunday.
  • The long-running show referenced the polarizing "Seinfeld" series finale in its ending.
Advertisement

"Curb Your Enthusiasm" finally came to an end after 12 seasons on the air. For fans of Larry David's long-running sitcom, it was a bittersweet but fitting ending.

David, the co-creator of "Seinfeld," played a fictionalized version of himself on the show that first aired in 2000. The series finale of "Curb" wrapped up the story with a perfectly calibrated callback to the ending of David's earlier show, complete with the returns of some memorable characters.

How did the 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' series finale end?

In the final episode, called "No Lessons Learned," Larry faces trial in Atlanta after violating the Election Integrity Act of 2021 in the first episode of the season. During the trial, the district attorney, Earl Mack (Greg Kinnear), calls character witnesses to testify against Larry. They're all people who have had memorable spats with Larry on the show over the years, including Mocha Joe (Saverio Guerra), Irma (Tracey Ullman), and Bruce Springsteen himself.

This mirrors the structure of the "Seinfeld" series finale. In that episode, called "The Finale," past characters from throughout the show's nine seasons returned as character witnesses after Jerry (Jerry Seinfeld), George (Jason Alexander), Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and Kramer (Michael Richards) were arrested and put on trial for violating a local Good Samaritan law in a small Massachusetts town when they didn't intervene to help a man getting car-jacked. Much like Larry being confronted by the many people who hate him, the "Seinfeld" also crew faced ghosts from their past dredging up their bad behavior during their trial.

The twist is how the "Curb Your Enthusiasm" ending differs. "Seinfeld" ends with the four leads being found guilty and sentenced to a year in prison; the last we see of them, they're all actually serving out their sentences. A conversation they have in the jail cell is a callback to a conversation in the very first episode of the series.

Advertisement

Larry is also found guilty in the "Curb" finale and similarly sentenced to a year in prison. He has a conversation complaining about his "pants tent" that's a call-back to a conversation in the first episode of the show and that episode's title. But that's where the two comedies diverge. Instead of leaving Larry in prison, Jerry Seinfeld (playing a version of himself) shows up, having previously run into Larry earlier in the episode, and informs Larry that one of the jurors in his trial broke his sequester.

The resulting mistrial gets Larry out of prison. Then, things get meta. As he's picking him up, Seinfeld tells Larry, "You don't want to end up like this. Nobody wants to see it. Trust me."

Larry tells Seinfeld that "this is how we should've ended the finale," referencing the widely hated "Seinfeld" finale. Both kick themselves for not thinking of this ending back when that show ended.

"Curb" ends with Larry on a flight back home with his friends.

Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David in the series finale of "Curb Your Enthusiasm."John Johnson/HBO

A lot of people really hated the 'Seinfeld' ending

It's been over 25 years since the series finale of "Seinfeld" aired on May 14, 1998. Despite the fact that decades have passed, some of the 76.3 million people who tuned in are still mad about it.

Advertisement

A lot of critics hated it, too.

Entertainment Weekly's Ken Tucker gave the "Seinfeld" series finale a C-, calling David (who'd left the show after the seventh season but returned to write the finale) a "spiteful, unforgiving moralist" for making the main characters "pay for all their years of selfishness, self-absorption, immaturity, and greed."

"From the episode's start (an oddly paced coffee-shop scene) to an ending that was like a Samuel Beckett first draft, the show's swan song was off-key and bloated," Tucker wrote.

Even Seinfeld himself had some regrets about the divisive ending. "I sometimes think we really shouldn't have even done it," he said in an interview at the New Yorker Festival in 2017, per Vulture. "There was a lot of pressure on us at that time to do one big last show, but big is always bad in comedy."

Ironically, even though some are now saying David "fixed" things with the twist in the "Curb" ending, the comedian has been a defender of the "Seinfeld" series finale all along. In season seven of "Curb," where the main cast of "Seinfeld" appeared for an arc where they reunited to "make up for the finale," the fictionalized Larry insisted it was "a good finale."

Advertisement

David has also suggested that the bad reception to the "Seinfeld" finale even took the pressure off for him wrapping up "Curb," in a way — which makes it even more clever how he brought that ending back for a re-do.

"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," David told Grantland in 2014, adding that he thought the conceit for bringing back all the characters in the finale trial was "clever."

Clearly, that gimmick worked better this time around — "No Lessons Learned" is the highest-rated episode of "Curb" on IMDb as of writing.

You are subscribed to notifications!
Looks like you've blocked notifications!
Next Article