Based on the true life of Larry David, a great comedian who achieves a great success and gains a huge popularity, as he has a beautiful wife and a comfortable life, the thing that makes him distinctive from others, as the drama follows his daily life, the challenged he faces, and his friends alike.
Curb Your Enthusiasm has an unhurried, improvisational style that may cause restlessness. And David, playing himself as a cranky pessimist, is a determinedly unlovable star. But stay with the 10-week series and you'll be ensnared by his sly humor.
The character Larry David plays in HBO's new 10-episode cinema verite comedy is self-absorbed, duplicitous, unnervingly off-balance and overcome by an extraordinary sense of self entitlement. No one has created a funnier TV character this fall.
What makes the show so entertaining and hilarious is Larry's tendency to be socially inappropriate (much like Seinfeld's George Costanza) and get obsessed with tiny details, like Jerry Seinfeld's TV character.
Curb Your Enthusiasm dials the moral tone back a few years, to when Seinfeld was deftly, hilariously, showing us the dark truths about our baseness as humans and as a society.
A peril of improv comedy is that the im and prov aren't always in sync. Although that rarely happens here, "Curb Your Enthusiasm" does at times belabor the black cloud that hovers over David's head from start to finish. Mostly, though, this show is a gas.
