Curb Your Enthusiasm “The Pants Tent”

One of the reasons I do this is so I can actually get around to shows that I have, for one reason or another, wanted to watch but never got around to.  In the case of Curb Your Enthusiasm, I have seen most of season one, and that’s about it for complete episodes.  Beyond that, it’s just bits of stuff from here or there.

Anyway, I am trying again!  But I am also skipping the “stand-up special” that was basically a prototype for this series.  Yes, it also features Cheryl Hines and Jeff Garlin, but I seem to recall Larry and Cheryl mentioning some kids in a throwaway line, so that’s clearly a different universe.

Instead, it’s the adventures of a fictitious version of Larry David, played by Larry, in a series where Larry got at least a co-story credit on every episode and most of the dialogue may have been improvised.  Larry, famously, was the co-creator of Seinfeld, something the fictional Larry would rather people not mention as a means of getting perks, and and was equally famous as the inspiration for the character of George Costanza.

That actually does explain a lot of what’s happening here.  Larry is a louder and more abrasive version of George in many ways, and he’s allowed to do a bit more here because this was HBO and not NBC.  Since this is Larry sort of playing himself, there’s appearances by Richard Lewis as himself and Larry’s longtime friend as well as Kathy Griffin briefly popping in as herself and for once in a way that didn’t annoy me much.  But then there’s Hines, Garlin, and Susie Essman as fictional characters carrying the same first names, and for the first two, their roles are pretty well established even in this first episode.  Essman, meanwhile, isn’t given as much to do as the role of “member of Jeff’s family that hates Larry” is being fulfilled by his parents.

But the stakes here are, as with Seinfeld, pretty low.  Larry gets himself into trouble with the wife, Jeff’s parents, and Richard Lewis’s new girlfriend Sofia thanks to various relatively minor social faux pas incidents like a pair of pants that tent up in ways that make it look like he might have an erection when a friend of Cheryl’s offers him comfort after an argument with a woman who turns out to be Sofia, or Larry makes a Hitler joke in reference to his wife without knowing Jeff had him on speakerphone, and then he tells his wife a lie so she won’t know about the Hitler joke.  Everything eventually culminates with Larry’s getting a death glare from Cheryl while the pair are out to dinner at a fancy new eatery.

Essentially, Larry is a guy who apparently can never say the right thing, and his attempts to remove himself from those problems only make things worse for him since he is incapable of just being honest when he thinks a white lie will serve him well, and he has a way about him that will eventually get on everyone’s last nerve if they spend enough time with him.  He’s not so much evil as inconsiderate, and his attempts to just make things easier for himself always does the opposite.

In other words, it sounds like the sort of character I will enjoy watching.