This article contains pretty, pretty big spoilers for the finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
A few minutes into the final episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David is driving down a highway in Atlanta, where he’s become a folk hero for providing water to a woman waiting in line to vote—a real-life violation of Georgia’s Election Integrity Act. He’s on his way to stand trial for his inadvertent act of civil disobedience, but his arrival is delayed almost imperceptibly by a woman who refuses to let him exit. In classic Curb fashion, what could have been a brief moment of awkward hesitation quickly escalates to a battle of wills: He speeds up, outraged by her refusal to yield, and she follows suit, flipping him off through the window of her blue Mercedes. Eventually, Larry settles for returning the gesture and pulling in behind her, but when he runs into her by chance the following day, he can’t resist bringing it up. She broke the rules, and she has to pay.
Despite the fact that the other driver is played by no less than Oscar-winning actress Allison Janney, the brief game of exit-ramp chicken occupies only a tiny fraction of the episode, which closes the book on nearly 25 years of David’s stone-classic sitcom. (The plotline mainly serves the function of giving the late Richard Lewis, a mainstay of the show, something to do in its final act.) But it’s a perfect miniaturization of the series’ core obsession with rules, the spoken and unspoken kinds.
Larry David has called the caricature of himself he played over the show’s 120 episodes “a sociopath,” but he’s also, in the classical sense, a hero, a man who stands for something greater than himself. The trial that comprised much of the series’ closing argument was convened to determine whether Larry’s act of elementary compassion—giving a drink to a Black woman waiting in a long line on a sweltering Georgia afternoon—was also grounds for a felony conviction. But the real judgment was a more existential one. As a reporter on the courthouse steps put it, “It’s up to the jury to decide what kind of man Larry David is.”
Given that Larry’s own lawyer (Sanaa Lathan) admitted that he technically broke the law, his only hope for acquittal was jury nullification—convincing a dozen of his ostensible peers that he was right, even morally obligated, to do so. The world, after all, is full of unjust laws, and we need people who put them to the test. But when are they acting on sound and unassailable principles, and when are they just being, to use a word that has been lobbed at Larry countless times over Curb’s run, assholes? Is one man’s resistance hero another’s entitled prick?
Like a wealthy liberal Immanuel Kant, Larry held the world to his own version of the categorical imperative: Follow the rules, except the bullshit ones. If an able-bodied person uses the handicapped stall when there’s no one else around, is anyone harmed? Is there any reason why the kitchen stops serving breakfast at 11? The answer to both questions, as Larry eventually finds out, is “Yes.” But he’s not the kind of hero who’s always in the right. In fact, as a string of character witnesses drawn from as far back as Curb Your Enthusiasm’s second season testify, he’s been petty and spiteful and inappropriate on innumerable occasions. But he’s also been the victim of misunderstandings that social niceties and baked-in assumptions make impossible to rationalize. (In fact, that was a water bottle in his pants when he hugged the little girl who, 23 years after Season 2’s “The Doll,” takes the stand against him, but try explaining what it was doing there.) As he laments in the 1999 special, also called Curb Your Enthusiasm, that gave birth to the series, “It’s very hard to do the right thing 24 hours a day.”
Curb Your Enthusiasm’s swan song was structured as both a do-over for Seinfeld’s much-disliked finale and a middle finger to its critics. (Its title, “No Lessons Learned,” restated Seinfeld’s antisentimental credo, “No hugging, no learning,” while warning off anyone who might have expected Larry David the creator to prove any more susceptible to public criticism than Larry David the character.) More than once over Curb’s final season, Larry was prompted to remind people that he had nothing to do with Seinfeld’s last two seasons, only to grimace when they responded, “But you came back for the finale, right?” Just like Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer, Larry wound up behind bars, a fitting punishment for his social transgressions, if not his legal ones. But he wound up getting sprung by no less than Seinfeld himself, thanks to an uncomfortable exchange between the sitcom star and one of Larry’s jurors, whose inability to abide by the judge’s sequestration order resulted in a mistrial. Imprisoned by one petty legality, Larry was freed by another. The system worked.
If Seinfeld’s finale condemned its leads to the Sartrean hell of each other’s company, Curb’s suggested that the world itself is a prison. It began and ended on an airplane, where the push to monetize status anxiety has made every minor decision—carry on or check? Seat up or back?—feel like life or death. In the first scene, Larry’s refusal to put his phone in airplane mode is foiled by a passenger who anonymously rats him out, triggering yet another of his confrontations with the service workers whom he treats as the first responders of pointless compliance. (Nothing triggers Larry’s sense of outrage like the notion that some apparently unjustified rule is “just our policy.”) He bemoans the backstabbing betrayal of his airline snitch, but hell, if he’s got to follow the rule, so does everyone else. As his friends Jeff and Leon flaunt their still-connected phones, he squeals on them one by one—all while neglecting to switch his own phone off.
In the series’ coda, Larry’s back on the plane, with the series’ supporting cast stretched out across the row alongside him. Jeff’s wife, Susie, throws up her window shade and a blinding ray of sunshine pierces through the cabin. She says she just wants to read her book, but the brightness hurts Larry’s eyes, and Leon can’t even see the screen in front of him. (He’s been bingeing Seinfeld the whole episode, and he’s finally caught up to the finale.) A more polite group—a more cordial one, to use a word Curb’s final season throws around as a term of abuse—might negotiate their way to some compromise, but not this entitled, quick-to-anger bunch. They’re stranded in a permanent squabble, filling first class with the sound of their endless aggrievement. With the authorities beaten and our heroes’ self-restraint snuffed out, there’s no one left to stop them.
