Curb Your Enthusiasm (TV Program)

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      Richard Lewis and Larry David’s Lifelong Friendship

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      The two comics were born three days apart in the same Brooklyn hospital, and their paths never stopped crossing. They became the best of friends — in their own way.If ever a Hollywood friendship was destined to be, it might have been the one between the comics Larry David and Richard Lewis, who died from a heart attack on Tuesday at 76. They were born just three days apart in 1947 at the same Brooklyn hospital. When they were 12, they met at summer sports camp, and instantly detested each other. That would set the tone that would define their friendship — and their onscreen relationship — for the rest of their lives.“I disliked him intensely,” Lewis told The Spectator last year, calling the young David cocky and arrogant. “When we played baseball, I tried to hit him with the ball. We were archrivals. I couldn’t wait for the camp to be over just to get away from Larry. I’m sure he felt the same way.” (He did. “We hated each other,” David said during a 2002 interview.)About a decade or so later, they found themselves performing at the same New York comedy club — both honing their similar brand of neurotic humor — but didn’t recognize one another at first. Later that same night, something clicked inside Lewis: “I looked at his face, and I said, ‘There’s something about you, man, that spooks me.’” With that, their memories were jogged.“We became instant best friends,” David said of Lewis during that 2002 interview, at the Paley Center for Media. In 2010, talking with Howard Stern, Lewis said, “When I became a comic, he loved my work, and I loved his work.”“For most of my life, he’s been like a brother to me,” David said of Lewis in a statement on Wednesday, shared by HBO. “He had that rare combination of being the funniest person and also the sweetest. But today he made me sob and for that I’ll never forgive him.”David was not available for questions on Thursday morning.Last month, Lewis spoke to The Times’s Melena Ryzik about those early days. “Without sounding too pompous about it, I always dug comedians who were the same onstage as they were offstage,” Lewis said, referring to David. “There wasn’t too much fake stuff going on, they didn’t create a character, they were just who they were.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Richard Lewis, Comedian and ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Actor, Dies at 76

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      After rising to prominence for his stand-up act, he became a regular in movies and TV, most recently on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”Richard Lewis, the stand-up comedian who first achieved fame in the 1970s and ’80s with his trademark acerbic, dark sense of humor, and who later parlayed that quality into an acting career that included movies like “Robin Hood: Men in Tights” and a recurring role as himself on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” died on Tuesday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 76.His publicist, Jeff Abraham, said the cause was a heart attack. Mr. Lewis announced last year that he had Parkinson’s disease.Mr. Lewis was among the best-known names in a generation of comedians who came of age during the 1970s and ’80s, marked by a world-weary, sarcastic wit that mapped well onto the urban malaise in which many of them plied their trade.After finding success as a comedian in New York nightclubs, he became a regular on late-night talk shows, favored as much for his tight routine as for his casual, open affability as an interviewee. He appeared on “Late Night With David Letterman” 48 times.And he was at the forefront of the boom in stand-up comedy that came with the expansion of cable television in the late 1980s.Mr. Lewis performing as a standup in Las Vegas in 2005. He called himself “the Prince of Pain.” Ethan Miller/Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Best Laughs on ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Have Always Been Larry’s Own

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      For almost 25 years, Larry David has charmed us with his knowing mischief and endearing jolliness.As the creator and star of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” Larry David has been ambling in and out of view for almost 25 years, playing a version of himself whose odyssey is now winding to a close: This month, the show began its 12th and final season, concluding a run that started in the last days of the Clinton administration. David has also, in a more colloquial sense, played himself. “Curb” sends up his celebrity, rendering him a tetchy caricature whose showbiz success has granted him time enough at last to enjoy the pettier things in life. This “Larry” is a gadfly who goads others, and himself, into fits of rancor. Yet he’s also gregarious, the type for whom every car ride is an occasion to discuss, say, the serenity of gardeners or a possible link between the words “yoga” and “yogurt.” In “Curb,” discomfort has always been made tolerable by such frivolity, and by the knowing mischief of David’s performance. At its heart is the signature of David’s screen persona: his own irrepressible laughter. “I am laughing constantly when we’re shooting,” David once said in an interview with the journalist Bill Carter. He extemporizes a lot too: The actors on “Curb” largely improvise their way through scenes, following basic outlines. This accounts for the show’s charming strangeness, its relaxed approach to dialogue and narrative incident. As one of the show’s executive producers, Jeff Schaffer, recently explained, David “wants to be surprised” while filming — and if his reactions “seem like real laughs, they’re real laughs, because Larry’s hearing it for the first time, too.”In other shows, these moments might constitute “breaking,” disruptions to the reality of the scene that are usually edited out. On “Curb,” too, many of David’s reactions have become outtakes. But some remain in the show itself, roiling its mixture of absurdities and half-truths. There is an artful, unstudied naturalism to David’s acting, which makes the boundaries between real laughs and stylized ones elusive. The viewer looks for a telltale sign, some jolt of spontaneity — which is just what David’s most authentic laughs provide. At such moments he’s still Larry David, tactless noter of peccadilloes. But you can also detect an overlapping spectacle: Larry David himself, openly appreciating the comedic inventions of his scene partners. Or even, sometimes, his own. In Season 4, we watch him rehearse how he might request some baseball tickets from a friend whose father recently passed away. “I know you’re still in mourning,” he begins — but he’s quickly cut off by the familiar sound of his own chortling, a kind of protracted, gut-punch wheeze.His biggest reactions combine the toothy luster of dentistry ads with the unstoppable giddiness common to pot-addled youths. The only inducement he needs is a bit of banter. In Season 7, Jerry Seinfeld, with whom David famously created a hit sitcom, guest-stars as himself. After overhearing the clamor of David’s urination, a baffled Seinfeld registers his astonishment: “I’ve never heard a — a stream like that.” David’s response: an eruption of hearty, jaw-trembling laughter. His laughter is so robust, so distinct, that other stars trade stories and impressions. “He laughs so hard at stuff,” the actor Bill Hader once marveled on Conan O’Brien’s podcast. “Like if you just started yanking on the cord of a ventriloquist dummy, up and down,” O’Brien replied. “That’s his laugh.” The same endearing jolliness distinguished “Seinfeld.” In his own self-performance, Seinfeld often seemed delighted by his colleagues, and by the ridiculous opportunities the show afforded its cast. He made many scenes funnier simply by acknowledging their silliness. In one episode, he cannot keep a straight face while being scolded by an improbably intense “library investigations officer.” Nor can he hide his smile in “The Diplomat’s Club” as his supposedly harried character announces that he is “freaking out.” There’s a difference between a thoughtfully airy performance and a carelessly bad one, and in both “Curb” and “Seinfeld,” a measure of informality becomes something felicitous. Each show offers up endless varieties of pique and mendacity — all of which you learn to laugh off. Seinfeld and David do not anchor their shows so much as cut the ropes and let them drift free. We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Made Something Out of Nothing

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      At the end of his 1999 HBO special, “Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm,” David wraps up a stand-up comedy set by telling his audience he has no more material for them. “This is what happens when you run out of nothing,” he says.The joke refers to the famous description of “Seinfeld,” the sitcom that David created with Jerry Seinfeld, as “a show about nothing.” It is also a bit of a lie.For starters, it was always misleading to say that “Seinfeld” was about nothing. Yes, it was militantly anti-message, building small-bore farces around four single, child-free New Yorkers who had an inordinate amount of time to sit in a diner. But its allergy to making statements was a statement in itself; it made the show emblematic of the sanguine, end-of-history 1990s.Second, David hadn’t really run out of anything. “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the comedy of ill manners that emerged from David’s special, began on HBO in 2000. It has run off and on for nearly a quarter-century, and Season 12, beginning on Sunday, will be its last.On “Curb,” David starred as “Larry David,” simultaneously the world’s most comfortable and uncomfortable man, registering his complaints to a cast of sounding boards: Cheryl (Cheryl Hines), his wife and later ex-wife; Jeff (Jeff Garlin), his manager; Leon (J.B. Smoove), his permanent houseguest, who joined the series in mid-run and filled the chaos-demon role that Kramer (Michael Richards) did on “Seinfeld.”On “Curb,” David has starred as “Larry David,” simultaneously the world’s most comfortable and uncomfortable man.John Johnson/HBOWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Best Movies and TV Shows Streaming in February: ‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith,’ ‘Shogun,’ More

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      “Genius:MLK/X,” a “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” series, a remake of “Shogun” and “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans” are among the new arrivals.Every month, streaming services add movies and TV shows to its library. Here are our picks for some of February’s most promising new titles. (Note: Streaming services occasionally change schedules without giving notice. For more recommendations on what to stream, sign up for our Watching newsletter here.)New to Amazon Prime Video‘Mr. & Mrs. Smith’ Season 1Starts streaming: Feb. 2Based on the 2005 blockbuster film of the same name, the spy thriller series “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” stars Donald Glover (who also cocreated the show with Francesca Sloane) as a spy code-named John who gets paired with a spy code-named Jane (Maya Erskine) in an operation that has them posing as a married couple. While trying to get a handle on their assignment, the fake spouses also have to get to know each other, and to figure out whether it’s helpful or detrimental to their mission to have actual romantic chemistry. Though there are chase scenes and explosions sprinkled throughout, this take on the “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” premise is more grounded. It’s about two attractive single people in New York City, balancing a relationship and a very, very strange job.Also arriving:Feb. 8“The Silent Service”Feb. 9“Upgraded”Feb. 13“Five Blind Dates”Feb. 16“This Is Me … Now: A Love Story”Feb. 19“Giannis: The Marvelous Journey”Feb. 23“Jenny Slate: Seasoned Professional”“Poacher”“The Second Best Hospital in the Galaxy” Season 1Feb. 29“Red Queen”Dario Argento in the documentary “Dario Argento Panico.”ShudderNew to AMC+‘Dario Argento Panico’Starts streaming: Feb. 2The Italian filmmaker Dario Argento has been a favorite of genre fans and cinephiles since the 1970s, when his stylish, blood-soaked thrillers like “The Bird With the Crystal Plumage” and “Suspiria” introduced a unique cinematic language, halfway between Hitchcockian suspense and Grand Guignol theater. In the Shudder documentary “Dario Argento Panico,” Argento and some of his collaborators and admirers (including the directors Guillermo del Toro and Nicolas Winding Refn) look back across his long career, discussing his unique vision as well as the controversies surrounding the violence in his movies and the intensity of his working methods. The film is a comprehensive introduction to an artist whose work and personality can come off as aloof and demanding, but who has long appealed to people who don’t mind a challenge.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Susie Essman Says Goodbye to ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’

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      The comedian Susie Essman spots them regularly, out in the urban wild: fashion doppelgängers.We had barely begun our lunch at Cafe Luxembourg on the Upper West Side when she leaned in and gestured conspiratorially. “That’s a total Susie Greene outfit,” she said, spying a woman entering the restaurant in a hooded, salmon-orange jumpsuit crosshatched with mint green slashes. “And she’s got a leopard-print purse, look at that!” She sat back, delighted.Power clashing is the life force of Susie Greene, the singular character that Essman has inhabited on “Curb Your Enthusiasm” since the HBO series, created by Larry David, began in 2000. There is no one in the entertainment universe who dares to dress like her — not just a clash but a dogfight of pattern, color and texture, with a dollop of feather — and few who communicate as she does, in an ornery gush of inspired expletives.As Greene, the much put-upon wife of David’s manager, played by Jeff Garlin, Essman is more than just a fan favorite. She is an instigator — “a scene-driver,” as she put it — whose costumes and insults get even wilder on the 12th and final season of “Curb,” which starts Feb. 4. She is also the person who, her castmates said, makes David crack up most regularly.Essman, 68, and David, 76, the “Seinfeld” co-creator who stars as a heightened, less scrupulous version of himself, have known each other since their stand-up days in the ’80s. He cast her, in what was then a small part, after seeing her withering set at a roast of Jerry Stiller in 1999. “She was filthy, profane and hilarious — exactly what I wanted,” David wrote in an email.Essman in the 12th and final season of the show. John Johnson/HBOHe didn’t give her much to go on — no character description or deep back story, just telling her that the show would be improvised and that he and the on-screen Susie would have, he said, “a contentious relationship.” The rest was on Essman.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘Vanderpump Rules’ and the Grammys

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      The Bravo hit returns for an 11th season, and the Recording Academy hands out awards.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Jan. 29-Feb. 4. Details and times are subject to change.MondayBAD ROMANCE 10 p.m. on ABC. In February 2023, Becky Bliefnick was murdered in her home, and her estranged husband, Tim Bliefnick, was immediately the primary person of interest. Evidence was found in the home and online, but one of the creepiest parts of the case is an appearance Tim made on “Family Feud” years earlier. The question he was asked didn’t seem out of the ordinary: “What’s the biggest mistake you made at your wedding?” His answer: “Honey, I love you, but said, ‘I do.’” This special edition of “20/20” takes a deeper look at the case.TuesdayVANDERPUMP RULES 8 p.m. on Bravo. I will always choose “Below Deck” over anything else in the Bravo universe, but I can humbly admit that this season premiere is going to be one of the network’s biggest must-watch moments all year. After “Scandoval” set the reality-television world aflame, this is the first chance to check back in with Tom Sandoval and Ariana Madix (minus Rachel Leviss, who has left the show). With Madix headed to Broadway to play Roxie in “Chicago” and Tom Schwartz coming off a slight character-redeeming run on “Winter House,” I personally can’t wait to see more drama unfold.WednesdayNaomi Watts and Tom Hollander in “Feud.”FXFEUD 10 p.m. on FX. Ryan Murphy is back at it with another season of his anthology series. When the show debuted in 2017, it focused on a feud between the actresses Joan Crawford and Bette Davis that exploded when they filmed “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” This season, subtitled “Capote vs. the Swans,” focuses on the fallings-out that the writer Truman Capote had with New York City socialites, including Ann Woodward, Babe Paley and C.Z. Guest.ThursdayFARMER WANTS A WIFE 9 p.m. on Fox. The second season, hosted by the singer and actress Jennifer Nettles, is bringing 32 “city girls” to the countryside to meet four single farmers to hopefully create a match. Look, it’s definitely not conventional (and might not be particularly successful), but I’ve read enough novels with the “big city girl moves to a small town and falls in love” trope that I’m willing to suspend my disbelief — for now.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber?  More

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      What’s on TV This Week: ‘After Yang’ and the State of the Union

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      Colin Farrell, Jodie Turner-Smith and Justin H. Min star in a new sci-fi movie on Showtime. And President Biden delivers a State of the Union address.Between network, cable and streaming, the modern television landscape is a vast one. Here are some of the shows, specials and movies coming to TV this week, Feb. 28-March 6. Details and times are subject to change.MondayTRAYVON MARTIN: 10 YEARS LATER 8 p.m. on BET. Trayvon Martin, a 17-year-old Black teenager in Florida, was shot and killed almost exactly 10 years ago by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch captain. Gayle King, the co-host of “CBS Mornings,” hosts this hourlong special, which commemorates Martin and looks at the activism that his death continues to help galvanize. The program includes interviews with Martin’s mother, Sybrina Fulton, and other mothers whose children have been killed by the police or by gun violence.MY BRILLIANT FRIEND 10 p.m. on HBO. The third season of the show, which centers on a friendship between two girls, Lenù and Lila, who come of age in mid-20th-century Naples, will debut on Monday night. It is adapted from the third of Elena Ferrante’s four Neopolitan books, “Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay,” and finds Lenù and Lila grappling with careers, marriage and, eventually, motherhood. This will be the final season for the actresses Margherita Mazzucco, 19, and Gaia Girace, 18: The fourth book in the series, “The Story of the Lost Child,” which would be the focus of a potential fourth season, revolves around the characters in middle age. “I have never read the final pages of the fourth book,” Mazzucco told The New York Times recently. “I don’t want to know how it ends.”TuesdayPresident Biden in February. He is scheduled to deliver his State of the Union address on Tuesday.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York TimesSTATE OF THE UNION 9 p.m. on various networks (check local listings); streaming on Facebook, Twitter, WH.gov and YouTube. President Biden is set to deliver his State of the Union speech to Congress on Tuesday night. Biden will presumably speak to the progress that his administration has made since his first address to Congress last year — including the passage of the $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill and the nearly $1.9 trillion stimulus package — though he’ll have a lot more to cover. He’s likely to address Russia’s war on Ukraine, the selection of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson as his nominee to the Supreme Court and the state of the coronavirus pandemic, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention loosen safety guidelines.Inside the World of Elena FerranteThe mysterious Italian writer has won international attention with her intimate representations of Neapolitan life, womanhood and friendship. Beginner’s Guide: New to Elena Ferrante’s work? Here’s a breakdown of her most important writing. Latest Novel: Following the success of her Neapolitan novels, the author returned to fiction with a suspenseful story about parents and their sins.English-Language Translator: The work of Ann Goldstein has helped catapult Ferrante to global fame. Humility is a hallmark of her approach.Onscreen: The HBO series based on Ferrante’s “My Brilliant Friend” is a testament to the elusive writer’s ability to create inscrutable characters.Lenù and Lila: The actresses playing the two protagonists in the HBO adaptation grew up with their characters. Here is what they said about it.THE LARRY DAVID STORY 9 p.m. on HBO. What’s the difference between Larry David the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” character and Larry David the successful producer and performer? Based on a trailer for “The Larry David Story,” the answer is a dusting of facial hair and a touch of introspection. David reflects on his life and career in this two-part documentary, which covers his upbringing in Brooklyn, his beginnings in comedy, his success with “Seinfeld” (which he co-created) and his more recent work on “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” The documentary was directed by the comic and filmmaker Larry Charles, a staff writer on “Seinfeld” whose well-established rapport with David comes through in their conversations.WednesdayLA STRADA (1956) 6 p.m. on TCM. When the Oscar for best international feature is handed out at the Academy Awards ceremony next month, the winner will become part of a lineage that “La Strada” helped establish: This Federico Fellini classic was the first movie to win the best foreign-language film honor when that category became a competitive award at the Oscars in 1956. The movie raised the profiles of both Fellini and his wife and collaborator, Giulietta Masina, who plays a young woman who is sold to a traveling circus strongman (Anthony Quinn). “‘La Strada’ is often sentimental and not always convincing but the ending packs a wallop,” J. Hoberman wrote about the film last year in his “Rewind” column.ThursdayTilda Swinton in “The French Dispatch.”Searchlight PicturesTHE FRENCH DISPATCH (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO Signature. Wes Anderson drew inspiration from the old-school days of The New Yorker for this ornate anthology comedy, which follows a collection of eccentric magazine writers and their subjects — played by an ensemble that includes Bill Murray, Benicio Del Toro, Léa Seydoux, Jeffrey Wright, Frances McDormand and Tilda Swinton — in a mid-20th-century French city. Typewriters clack. Cocktails disappear.FridayAFTER YANG (2022) 9 p.m. on Showtime. In his 2017 feature debut, “Columbus,” the filmmaker Kogonada used the modernist architecture of Columbus, Ind., to give a surreal, otherworldly undercurrent to a modest story about a close friendship. His new movie, “After Yang,” takes place solidly in the future: It centers on a mother (played by Jodie Turner-Smith), father (Colin Farrell) and young daughter (Malea Emma Tjandrawidjaja) whose humanoid robot, Yang (Justin H. Min), breaks down. The loss of Yang is essentially the loss of a family member, but it may be possible to repair him.SaturdayVin Diesel, left and John Cena in “F9.” Giles Keyte/Universal PicturesF9 (2021) 8 p.m. on HBO. If the “Fast and Furious” movies went all-electric, and the grunt of gasoline engines was muted, the series could still rely on Vin Diesel’s voice to fill out the low end of the sonic spectrum. The latest installment of the series introduced a new villain, played by John Cena, and brought back the familiar faces of Michelle Rodriguez, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, Helen Mirren and Charlize Theron. The movie also saw the return of the director Justin Lin, a veteran of the franchise who had stepped away for several years. Lin makes the movie “feel scrappy and baroque at the same time,” A.O. Scott said in his review for The Times.SundayLester Holt, left, and the former Attorney General William P. Barr in an NBC News primetime special.NBC NewsNBC NEWS PRIMETIME SPECIAL 9 p.m. on NBC. Lester Holt interviews the former Attorney General William P. Barr in this hourlong special. The two discuss Barr’s final days as Attorney General during the Trump administration, when he rebuked former President Donald J. Trump’s false claims of a stolen election by acknowledging that the Justice Department had found no evidence of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. The conversation also touches on policing in America, among other topics. More