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    Jeff Schaffer and Susie Essman on the ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Finale

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    In an interview, Jeff Schaffer and Susie Essman discuss why Larry David revived the polarizing “Seinfeld” finale. “We know what you thought of that, and we don’t care,” Schaffer said.With a parade of callbacks and a twist a quarter-century in the making, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the HBO series starring Larry David as a heightened version of himself, ended its 20-plus-year run on Sunday.The final episode, which referenced the polarizing 1998 finale of “Seinfeld,” David’s previous show, was replete with the usual out-of-bounds commentary and cranky fixation on minutiae; David and his co-stars — Jeff Garlin, Susie Essman, J.B. Smoove, Richard Lewis — do not, by creative mandate, change. (“I’m 76 years old, and I have never learned a lesson in my entire life,” David tells a child in the episode, in the opposite of a teachable moment.) In real life, though, the cast are longtime friends, and have weathered much together, including the death of Lewis, who played himself, in February.On Monday, Jeff Schaffer, the longtime executive producer and director, and Essman — who portrayed Susie Greene, the scene-stealing, expletive-hurling wife of David’s manager (Garlin) — got together for a post-mortem video interview about the series that, they said, changed their lives. Essman was in her home in New York, and Schaffer, who got his start as a writer on “Seinfeld,” was in the “Curb” offices in Los Angeles, where a sign on the wall behind him, hanging askew, read: “No defecation please.” (It was a prop from Latte Larry’s, the “spite store” that David’s character opened to malign a neighboring coffee shop, Schaffer said. “And it’s a sentiment I feel is as true now as it was then.”)Essman and Schaffer spoke about filming their final moments with Lewis, how the characters could live on, and why the “Seinfeld” finale idea led to the end of the series. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.When did you conceive of the finale?JEFF SCHAFFER It was July of ’22. We were writing the season — we weren’t that far — and we knew that we were starting with Georgia. [In the season premiere, David’s character gets arrested for giving a woman water while she waits to vote in defiance of a local election law.] When you start with a crime, one of the possibilities is a trial. So that was floating around, one of the many paths that we could go down.And we were just talking about a little story, of Larry not wanting to be involved in a kid’s lesson. We talk out the scene and distill it down to a few lines. In character, he said, “I’m 75 years old, I’ve never learned a thing in my life.” And that was the moment for us where we said, “Hold on a second, what if we just blew that up and just told everybody: ‘Larry’s never learned his lesson,’ and just did the ‘Seinfeld’ trial again?” Just owned it. Like, we know what you thought of that, and we don’t care. We’ve learned nothing. We’re going right at it. We’re steering the Titanic right back at the iceberg.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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      The ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Series Finale Wraps Up Like ‘Seinfeld’: Review

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      Larry David’s HBO comedy ended on Sunday after 12 seasons. Longtime fans might have noticed similarities with a certain earlier sitcom.After 12 seasons, spread across 25 years, the HBO comedy staple “Curb Your Enthusiasm” ends with an episode that sees Larry David put on trial. Witness after witness testifies to Larry’s lifetime of selfish and antisocial behavior. The jury finds him guilty, of course.Then he gets out of jail on a technicality and goes home. Because that’s the only kind of ending that makes sense in “Curb”-world.In fact, even former “Curb Your Enthusiasm” fans who hadn’t watched the show in years — but dropped back in for the finale — probably could have predicted how it was going to end. David (the creator, not the character) has never varied much from the formula he introduced on HBO back in 2000, when he first started telling darkly farcical, often cringe-inducing stories about the twists and turns of modern manners, featuring a fictionalized, exaggerated version of himself: a ridiculously rich crank, living off the fortune he made cocreating the sitcom “Seinfeld.”The final episode pays off a story line that had run through the final season since the premiere, when Larry (the character, not the creator), gave an old acquaintance named Auntie Rae Black (Ellia English) a bottle of water while she was waiting in line to vote in Atlanta, in violation of a Georgia election law.It also validated the popular theory that the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” finale would reflect or at least reference the polarizing final episode of “Seinfeld,” which David wrote. With its trial setting, callbacks to earlier episodes and cameos from memorable past guest stars, the “Curb Your Enthusiasm” finale mirrored the basic premise of the “Seinfeld” one, with a few key tweaks, and Jerry Seinfeld played a key role.In the “Seinfeld” finale, the main characters were put on trial for violating a Good Samaritan law by failing to help a person in need. In the “Curb” finale, Larry is on trial for being a Good Samaritan; the voting line incident had made him a folk hero to voting rights advocates. But in the world of the show, the words “hero” and “Larry David” couldn’t remain closely linked for long — it causes too much cognitive dissonance.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’ Finale Brings Memories of Divisive ‘Seinfeld’ Ending

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      As “Curb Your Enthusiasm” draws to a close, the “Seinfeld” co-creator gets another shot at ending a TV show.Larry David has long defended the “Seinfeld” finale. He’s often been its lone champion as critics, fans and the cast, including Jerry Seinfeld, have continued to lament the conclusion of one of television’s most successful, enduring sitcoms.On Sunday, David — the “Seinfeld” co-creator who left the show after its seventh season but returned to write the two-part finale, which aired on May 14, 1998 — will wrap up his other popular show: “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the on-again, off-again 12-season HBO comedy that started in 2000. And, if the signs are to be believed, the final episode may pay homage to the much-maligned “Seinfeld” send-off.If you didn’t experience it, it’s a tall order to convey the hype that surrounded the end of “Seinfeld,” which took the gang out of New York City and landed them in a Massachusetts jail for violating a Good Samaritan Law. A trial included a parade of character witnesses, many of them wronged by the defendants over nine seasons, attesting to their unethical behavior. Jerry, George, Elaine and Kramer were found guilty of, as the prosecutor put it, “selfishness, self-absorption, immaturity and greed.”“Seinfeld” was at the peak of its popularity, a cultural juggernaut and still making record profits for NBC at the end of its run — about $200 million a year, according to advertising industry estimates at that time. Nonetheless, Seinfeld was ready to close shop, turning down an offer from the network that would have been the most lucrative deal ever extended to a television star.“We’ve all seen a million athletes where you say, ‘I wish they didn’t do those last two years,’” Seinfeld said at the time. “I wanted the end to be from a point of strength. I wanted the end to be graceful.”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” Was Larry David’s Book of Manners

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      Suppose you’re out at brunch and find yourself in a buffet line that a fellow diner does not appear to have noticed. He casually approaches with his plate and tries to serve himself. Do you A. join the hangry mob cursing him or B. rise to this man’s defense, because you can see that he’s holding a plate, which means he already waited in line and is now returning for another helping? If you’re Larry David, not only is the answer B. but the misunderstanding warrants, in your scratchy Brooklyn accent, a triumphant clarification: “That’s not how we do things here in America! We don’t wait for seconds! Never!”Listen to this article, read by Ron ButlerOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.Larry knows from buffet breaches. He once caught someone pulling what he termed a chat-’n’-cut, gaining proximity to food by talking to someone with a choicer position in line. He doesn’t like it but is impressed anyway. (“I respect your skills.”) Another time, when a restaurant employee accuses him of violating its buffet policy by sharing his plate with his manager and main man, Jeff, a lawyer magically appears to clarify for the employee that after a diner purchases a meal what he does with it is his business. Justice — and brunch — have been served.But now let’s suppose that you’re a serious, middle-aged woman named Marilyn, and you’ve decided to host dinner for your new beau’s closest friends, and the guests include this Larry David, whom you’ve already had to shoo from the arm of one of your comfy chairs. The group raises a glass and toasts your hospitality — well, everybody except you know who. Susie, who is married to Jeff and clearly finds Larry as much of an irritant as you’ve begun to, asks, “You can’t clink, Larry?” Why should he? “Because it’s a custom that people do, which is friendly and nice.” Larry takes a sip of water and asks the most peculiar question: “What is this, tap?” It is. His response? “Surprised you don’t have a filter.” Do you A. serve him your coldest glance and witheringly reply, “You have no filter,” or B. ask him to leave your home? If you’re Marilyn, you do both.Susie Essman, who has been the show’s true superego, and Larry David in Episode 5 of Season 12.Warner Brothers DiscoveryThese stories hail from “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which is scheduled to deliver its final episode on April 7, after 12 seasons and 24 years on HBO. In each incident, bald, bespectacled, wiry, wealthy Larry has stepped out of line, once physically, to defend or offend. I went back and watched the whole series and would like to report that television has never had anything like this show, nothing as uncouth and contradictory and unhinged and yet somehow under a tremendous amount of thematic control, nothing whose calamity doubles as a design for living. It presents the American id at war with its puritanical superego. Sometimes Larry is the one. Sometimes he’s the other. The best episodes dare him to inhabit the two at once, heretic and Talmudist.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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      With Richard Lewis, Kvetching Was Charismatic

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      The comedian gave his Jewish neurotic persona a nervy cool even as he threw his whole body into his comedy.In the 1980s, Jewish characters were scarce on television. There were broadcasters (Howard Cosell) and the occasional talk show host (Joan Rivers), but no Jews leading a cast on prime time. Then in the final year of the decade, that changed, and a glut of anxious men arrived, kvetching, quipping and dating shiksas.Jackie Mason had his own sitcom, short-lived; Jerry Seinfeld had his, a classic. Then the following year, Rob Morrow played a Jewish doctor fish-out-of-watering in Alaska on “Northern Exposure.” But to my young Jewish eyes, none of them was as charismatic as Richard Lewis on the sitcom “Anything but Love.”Constantly grappling with a thick mane of hair, he played a smart Chicago journalist who charmed his love interest, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, whose royal status back then was derived from being pursued by an only slightly more relentless man in “Halloween.” Whereas Michael Myers paced calmly in a silly jumpsuit, Lewis bellyached in moody black outfits. For those who know him as the cranky friend of Larry David on “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” it may be a surprise that Richard Lewis, who died at 76 this week, cut a seductive figure: clever, cool, darkly morose.“Anything but Love” didn’t have the inspired absurdity or cutting wit of “Seinfeld,” and it began with the most sentimental theme song in the history of television. (Second place: “Family Ties.”) But Lewis brought a nervy energy that pushed against the saccharine instincts of network sitcoms. If he seemed like a new kind of Jewish neurotic comic, he built this persona in comedy clubs. His stand-up was full of stories about his love life that somehow managed to be self-deprecating and glamorous. He once told David Letterman, “The woman I’m with now insisted on having intercourse only with a raven on her shoulder.”William Knoedelseder’s book “I’m Dying Up Here,” about stand-up in the 1970s, presents Lewis as the Lothario of the scene, dating stars like Debra Winger and once picking up a Danish baroness at the Improv in Manhattan with this line: “I’ll take you out for a tuna fish sandwich anywhere in the city.” It worked.Lewis belonged to a class of young stand-ups, like Seinfeld and Bill Maher, who were influenced by the acerbic Everyman persona of Robert Klein. But Lewis eventually developed a frenetic, jazzy style that also owed something to chaos agents like Mel Brooks and Robin Williams. His jokes were delivered with rollicking energy, making misery a full-body exercise, slumping, pacing and, most of all, gesticulating. His comedy had choreography, a visual language of pointing, air-sawing and face clasps. To say he talked with his hands seems insufficient. His whole body never shut up.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 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 Recalled Friendship With Larry David in One of His Last Interviews

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      The occasion was a profile of a “Curb Your Enthusiasm” co-star, but Lewis got plenty of good lines in as he reminisced about starting out with Larry David.Richard Lewis called me barely a month ago, on Jan. 22, to gush about his friend Susie Essman.“I adore her,” he said, eagerly offering his thoughts for a profile of his co-star on the Larry David series “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “She’s so on the money with her delivery.”Lewis, who announced last year that he had Parkinson’s disease, played himself as David’s friend on the show (as he was in real life). He and Essman, the comedian and actress behind the invective-spewing Susie Greene, the wife of David’s manager, provoked very different reactions from fans, he recalled.“When I’ve been with her in public, they want her to yell things back at them,” he said. “For me, it’s like, ‘You’re going to be all right, Richard.’”He dialed me directly, rather than having a publicist connect us, as is more common, and seemed happy to stay on the phone and crack jokes.Listening to the recording of our conversation, I hear a lot of my own laughter. Lewis was effortlessly funny and sharp.“I’ve got to give Jeff Garlin a lot of credit for hanging in,” he said of the comic who plays David’s manager and Essman’s beleaguered husband, the object of her expletive-filled, improvised tirades. “I mean, it’s a television show, but how he can have any self-esteem left after what he has taken — it’s just a barrage. Every time a scene is over, it looks like he’s limping back from the Civil War. He’s just all bloodied.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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      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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      Quiz: Do You Respect ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’?

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      Photo credits: HBO (“Curb Your Enthusiasm”); NBC (“Seinfeld”); Craig Barritt/Getty Images (Elmo); Albert Ceolan /De Agostini Picture Library, via Getty Images (St Benedict amongst Angels, detail from The Glory in Heaven, 1746, by Johann Jakob Zeiller); Peter Dazeley/Getty Images (snakes); James Warwick/Getty Images (zebra); Simon Maina/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images (Moamer Kadhafi); Paramount (“Star Trek: The Next Generation”); Shawn Thew/EPA, via Shutterstock (Bernie Sanders); Universal Pictures (“Back to the Future”); Kenny Holston/The New York Times (Sanders); Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images (Sanders)Produced by Sean Catangui, Alicia DeSantis, Gabriel Gianordoli and Josephine Sedgwick More