With the finale of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm,’ Larry David puts an end to Larry David once and for all

While chatting with Jerry Seinfeld about the right way to end a series, Larry David walked away on Sunday, April 7, at the end of the 10^th episode of the 12^th season of Curb Your Enthusiasm. For good, according to David.

Just as one wouldn’t confuse Seinfeld − the immature, egotistical comedy character from Seinfeld − with comic-turned-TV mogul Jerry Seinfeld himself, one would never mistake Larry David − the cantankerous, multimillionaire septuagenarian protagonist of Curb Your Enthusiasm − for Larry David the American comedian, co-creator of Seinfeldcreator and actor on Curb.

Unless, like his fictional alter ego, he decides to go off and spend most of his time playing golf, we’ll be watching as David takes his bald head, annoyed, grimacing face and hair-trigger temper to other stages, script-writing efforts and talk show appearances.

But things won’t be the same anymore. The end of Curb Your Enthusiasm is like the end of a long (the first episode aired in 2000) postscript that David tacked on to the story of the golden age of comedy series. These shows unfolded over the span of many years, drawing tens of millions of viewers who felt they had become intimately familiar with Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer and the privileged tenants of Friends.

In 1998, the Seinfeld finale drew more than 76 million Americans. On Sunday, April 7, barely more than a million tuned in to watch “No Lessons Learned.” These numbers have served to illustrate the transformation of TV series: whereas the networks’ big hits had once drawn together people who had nothing in common, today’s shows attract small cohorts of followers, each in their own niche.

An escalation of social transgressions

David is too smart to bow out without taking into account the outdated place that Curb Your Enthusiasm occupies in today’s landscape. After a penultimate episode that featured Bruce Springsteen as a grumpy, frail grandpa, “No Lessons Learned” proved to be both a revisiting of the main foibles of a character who had plenty of them and a remake of the last two episodes of Seinfeldwritten by David in 1998.

In those episodes, Jerry and his cohorts had to make a court appearance for having failed to provide assistance to a person in danger − in other words, for selfishness (a trait that, above all others, had defined these children of the 1990s) − and their victims came to testify in the courtroom to the lack of consideration the defendants had shown them. A quarter of a century later, Larry appeared in a Georgia courtroom to give water to a Black voter who was standing in line under the direct sun in front of a polling station, thereby contravening the Southern state’s law that had been designed to discourage the African -American vote.

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