Enthusiasm Curbed

Good-Bye to Shows About Nothing

This is kind of a short read, so if you just need more of my kooky opinions, you can read my Seinfeld post from awhile back:

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Boom. Anyway, on with the fun stuff…

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As I write this, there are only two episodes left of Curb Your Enthusiasm, a show that debuted on HBO in 2000 and is about to wrap up its 12th and final season. Unless Larry David gets some funny ideas in a couple years and decides to bring it back and make me look like a fool. He would do something like that. He would probably call it a Spite Season.

Ordinarily, I don’t get very emotional about TV shows ending. In fact, there are a lot of shows that go on too long, and I kind of wish that they ended earlier. There are also shows where I see the series finale, and I feel like Andrew Lincoln in Love Actually: “Enough. Enough now.”

Where a show falls at the end is actually a source of anxiety for me, because we usually know when a series is ending, and I’m often afraid that they will screw it up. This may be due to the Seinfeld finale in 1998, an episode that is pretty much panned by everyone except Larry David himself. It was my favorite show, and I had been anticipating the finale for awhile, and yep. That was it.

I also have to admit that there are finales that I don’t even remember, so I guess they couldn't have been that great. I don’t exactly know why, but it seems like a really difficult thing to concoct the series finale of a beloved show. A lot of them throw in a time jump for no reason, or bring back a character that left just to send everyone home happy. Or do whatever it was that Game of Thrones did. Or they go the Six Feet Under route, where Alan Ball was so intent on it being the end that he showed the audience how every character died. There was speculation that he didn’t want HBO to bring it back without him, but most of the characters died really old, so there was still plenty of time to show what they did over the ensuing years. Incidentally, a lot of people say that SFU had one of the greatest series finales ever, and I disagree. I feel like it was a little pandering, but to each their own, I guess. The point is, there’s a lot of ways to go, and sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t.

Because of the nature of Curb, where the characters don’t grow or evolve that much, I was never too anxious about how it would end. I have speculated (with my pal Clay on our Curbcast, a weekly audio recap of the show - #alwaysbeplugging), but I always figured that Larry probably has had an idea for awhile. There have been hints this season about how he came back to do the Seinfeld finale, and our joke is that it is Checkov’s finale, but those may just be fun little callbacks. He could end up in jail like the Seinfeld quartet, he could end up dead, or maybe they will really throw fans a curveball and actually have something work out for him. Whatever happens, I’m not too worried.

The thing I have been thinking about lately, however, is that I feel like this is truly the end of an era of television. I have already mentioned the Seinfeld finale in 1998, but the Seinfeld premiere was way back in 1989. Other than the couple years between Seinfeld ending and Curb beginning, and the occasional hiatus for Larry, there has been a show about nothing on TV for my entire adult life. I’m not going to go so far as to say that it feels like saying good-bye to an old friend, because Larry would probably find that really dumb, but there was a certain comfort in knowing that these shows were there. Sure, there are other funny shows, and plenty of shows where the characters are irreverent and get into mishaps due to their own fault, but it’s not quite the same. Essentially, however, that is basically what most sitcoms have become but before 1989, it didn’t really happen. When working on Seinfeld, Larry David's mantra on the set was, “No Hugging. No Learning.” Before Seinfeld, most sitcoms had a male and female lead who seemed to hate each other, yet the audience would be left wondering when they were going to get together. Which they inevitably did. Larry didn’t care if his characters fell in love, or even liked each other. He just wanted them to do funny things. That is where the show about nothing label really came from, but I have always preferred to say that these shows were about everything.    

For years, there were situations in my own life that seemed like they were taken right from the pages of a Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm script. I’m obviously not the only one, which is why these shows are so popular to begin with, but because I always felt a connection to Jerry/Larry, I often wondered if I somehow put myself in these situations, either for the laugh or perhaps just subconsciously, or if life can just be weird. Or maybe I just see the humor in things the same way the creators of these shows do. Whatever it is, I just felt a connection, and It is this connection that makes me sad that this era is ending, because, as funny as Michael Scott and Leslie Knope were, they were just not my people.

Even with that little bit of sadness that I feel, I hope I’ll be taking the Andrew Lincoln approach when my enthusiasm is curbed for the final time. Of course, there will always be reruns and streaming when I need a fix, but as I limp closer to my fiftieth year, maybe I don’t need as much craziness. I am mainly glad that I had these shows in the first place. They made me laugh more than anything else I can think of, and probably changed my outlook on what is funny in life more than they should have. And that is enough. Enough now.