Is Larry David headed to the pen?
We’re about a third of the way through the twelfth(!) and final (!!) season of David’s two-decade HBO cornerstone Curb Your Enthusiasm, wherein he plays a lightly fictionalized version of himself, heavy on the misanthropy. TV’s “L.D.” is an increasingly unrepentant asshole, whose myopia and social bluntness often lands him into deserving hot water—there’s always an L in the wings, even when he’s technically right about whatever point he’s stubbornly refusing to concede. Now with the series’ last run fully underway, fans are wondering if David is setting L.D. up for the ultimate comeuppance: actual jail time.
Each collection of Curb episodes from season 2 onward has followed a loose narrative arc stringing together the otherwise unrelated misdaventures of a sitcom millionaire in his twilight years— Larry tries to open a restaurant; Richard Lewis needs a kidney, etc. The lifespan of the show can be cleanly demarcated into years 1-8, when it aired relatively consistently, and 9-12, which resumed after a lengthy break in which audiences and HBO execs alike weren’t sure if David would ever actually return.
David has been ending Curb seasons with finales that could be series finales since at least season 5; that’s the year that ends with Larry dying, only to annoy the angels in heaven (played by Dustin Hoffman and Sacha Baron Cohen) so much that they send him back to Earth. But the finales that followed would’ve been just as solid to ride out on: Larry finding new family with the Blacks; Larry finally delivering a universally acclaimed Seinfeld ending and winning his wife back, only to instantly remind her why she left him in the first place; Larry and Leon hopping from coast to coast, leaving a city’s worth of aggrieved people in their wake.
Notably, Wizards-era Curb has been marked by more high-concept arcs, like Larry incurring a fatwa or being blackmailed with an obscure California residential ordinance. Season 12 is fashioning him into an unlikely liberal hero, in a thinly veiled satire of Georgia voter malpractice (a storyline that’s sadly as relevant this year as it’s ever been.) During a visit to Atlanta, Larry offers water to Leon’s Auntie Rae as she waits in a criminally-long line outside her polling place; when he’s busted for violating Georgia’s (very real) Election Integrity Act, he pleads not guilty at Auntie Rae’s behest, in order to call attention to the ridiculousness of the law.
Suddenly the case develops into a lightning rod, and in the span of one episode, Larry goes from inadvertent and reluctant hero to lapping up the attention, courting interview requests from MSNBC’s Willie Geist and, in an upcoming episode, more than welcoming the attention from women who love a good social justice defender.
But while Curb may have always been a space for David to flex his misanthropic id, L.D. never gets away scot free, especially in recent years. Last season, Larry’s plot to outwit a blackmailer blew up in his face spectacularly, an L that led to him being trapped in a situationship with Tracey Ullman’s hilariously repugnant city councilwoman Irma Kostroski, stuck with the terrible actress Maria Sofia (Keyla Monterroso Mejia) as one of the leads on his new series, and almost drowning in a pool as a result of the very same fence law that he’d been caught violating.
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