\n<\/p>\n
After 12 seasons, spread across 25 years, the HBO comedy staple \u201cCurb Your Enthusiasm\u201d ends with an episode that sees Larry David put on trial. Witness after witness testifies to Larry\u2019s lifetime of selfish and antisocial behavior. The jury finds him guilty, of course.<\/p>\n
Then he gets out of jail on a technicality and goes home. Because that\u2019s the only kind of ending that makes sense in \u201cCurb\u201d-world.<\/p>\n
In fact, even former \u201cCurb Your Enthusiasm\u201d fans who hadn\u2019t watched the show in years \u2014 but dropped back in for the finale \u2014 probably could have predicted how it was going to end. David (the creator, not the character) has never varied much from the formula he introduced on HBO back in 2000, when he first started telling darkly farcical, often cringe-inducing stories about the twists and turns of modern manners<\/a>, featuring a fictionalized, exaggerated version of himself: a ridiculously rich crank, living off the fortune he made cocreating the sitcom \u201cSeinfeld.\u201d<\/p>\n The final episode pays off a story line that had run through the final season since the premiere, when Larry (the character, not the creator), gave an old acquaintance named Auntie Rae Black (Ellia English) a bottle of water while she was waiting in line to vote in Atlanta, in violation of a Georgia election law.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n It also validated the popular theory that the \u201cCurb Your Enthusiasm\u201d finale would reflect or at least reference the polarizing final episode of \u201cSeinfeld,\u201d<\/a> which David wrote. With its trial setting, callbacks to earlier episodes and cameos from memorable past guest stars, the \u201cCurb Your Enthusiasm\u201d finale mirrored the basic premise of the \u201cSeinfeld\u201d one, with a few key tweaks, and Jerry Seinfeld played a key role.<\/p>\n In the \u201cSeinfeld\u201d finale, the main characters were put on trial for violating a Good Samaritan law by failing to help a person in need. In the \u201cCurb\u201d finale, Larry is on trial for being a Good Samaritan; the voting line incident had made him a folk hero to voting rights advocates. But in the world of the show, the words \u201chero\u201d and \u201cLarry David\u201d couldn\u2019t remain closely linked for long \u2014 it causes too much cognitive dissonance.<\/p>\n This is a man who can rarely get through a single day without insulting or infuriating someone. All season long, even as he has accepted accolades for helping Auntie Rae, Larry has continued to make new enemies, getting under the skin of country club waitresses, masseuses, lawyers, rabbis and even Bruce Springsteen.<\/p>\n Before the trial begins in the finale, Larry irritates a flight attendant by failing to turn off his phone. He also has a road rage incident with a woman (Allison Janney) who turns out to be the old girlfriend of his pal Richard Lewis; and he annoys his ex-wife, Cheryl (Cheryl Hines), by announcing to everyone that she doesn\u2019t like Mexican food. Larry even manages to betray sweet Auntie Rae, when he and his manager, Jeff (Jeff Garlin), trick her into revealing her restaurant\u2019s top-secret salad dressing recipe.<\/p>\n All of this sets the scene for the courtroom drama, in which the judge (Dean Norris) allows the prosecuting attorney (Greg Kinnear) to establish Larry\u2019s character and motivations by bringing out a parade of the aggrieved from past \u201cCurb\u201d episodes. The coffee shop proprietor Mocha Joe (Saverio Guerra), whom Larry tried to put out of business by opening a \u201cspite store,\u201d gets his say. So does Alexander Vindman, the former Army colonel best known as a key witness in former President Donald J. Trump<\/a>\u2019s first impeachment trial. (He once overheard Larry possibly attempting to bribe a city councilwoman.) Even Springsteen appears, via video, to castigate Larry for giving him Covid. Larry\u2019s lawyer (Sanaa Lathan) watches helplessly as her defense crumbles.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In interviews, David has tried to deny any assertion that this final run of \u201cCurb\u201d would be a traditional last hurrah or even that this is the kind of sitcom suited to an old-fashioned grand finale, with long-running story lines tied off and beloved characters saying goodbye. The finale\u2019s title, \u201cNo Lessons Learned,\u201d is both a reminder to \u201cSeinfeld\u201d fans of that show\u2019s guiding maxim \u2014 \u201cno hugging, no learning\u201d \u2014 and a warning to \u201cCurb\u201d fans not to expect much.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Yet there has been a reflective quality to the final season. Several episodes seemed to refer directly to old \u201cSeinfeld\u201d bits: a smelly car, a coveted fountain pen, a baby who may or may not end up being named after Mickey Mantle, and the like. The finale, by repeating the broad strokes of the \u201cSeinfeld\u201d one, amounted to perhaps David\u2019s final defense of an episode that some fans have complained about since it aired in 1998.<\/p>\n In the \u201cSeinfeld\u201d finale, Jerry, Elaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), George (Jason Alexander) and Kramer (Michael Richards) were convicted in their trial and ended the series in a jail cell, where they repeated a conversation from the \u201cSeinfeld\u201d pilot. In the \u201cCurb\u201d finale, Larry is convicted and goes to jail, where he talks about his pants tenting up in the crotch area \u2014 a subject of the first \u201cCurb Your Enthusiasm\u201d episode.<\/p>\n Larry is freed, appropriately enough, by Seinfeld, who had come to the trial to support David. After Seinfeld spots a juror violating the judge\u2019s instructions, the case dismissed. As they are leaving the jail together, Jerry gently chastises Larry for once again trying to stick his audience with some kind of moral at the end of a series about unapologetic jerks. Then in the episode\u2019s most explicitly meta touch, they note that this outcome, with the main character walking out of jail in the end, is how they should have ended the \u201cSeinfeld\u201d finale.<\/p>\n On the grand scale of \u201cCurb Your Enthusiasm\u201d episodes, \u201cNo Lessons Learned\u201d is no all-timer. The comedy skews shrill; and while that isn\u2019t unusual for this show, it also feels a little forced, as the courtroom calamities keep piling up.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n This finale\u2019s pleasures are smaller \u2014 like the way Larry can\u2019t help but sing old 1950s or \u201960s TV cop show themes as he grinds through the criminal justice system. When Seinfeld arrives about halfway through the episode, the chemistry between Jerry and Larry is, as the \u201cSeinfeld\u201d hack comic Kenny Bania might put it, pure gold. They immediately start riffing about weird hypotheticals (like whether or not they\u2019d have sex with a circus\u2019s bearded lady if she shaved twice a day) and critiquing courtroom procedure. Even more than the nods to the \u201cSeinfeld\u201d finale, these scenes are a reminder of David\u2019s unique comic genius, which has sustained two of TV\u2019s greatest sitcoms.<\/p>\n Even if the \u201cCurb Your Enthusiasm\u201d finale lacks a sense of surprise, it does feel right for the show. One of David\u2019s go-to moves throughout \u201cCurb Your Enthusiasm\u201d has been the \u201cOK, I get it\u201d shrug, deployed whenever Larry realizes he may have gone too far and that whatever punishment coming to him is probably fair. Larry never gets to that point in this episode, although early on he does gleefully tell a small child that at age 76, he has \u201cnever learned a lesson.\u201d This, in a way, is the Larry shrug distilled into a single line.<\/p>\n Larry is who he is; and this show was what it was. Who would ever expect anything more than that?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n