Curb Your Enthusiasm is an HBO comedy by and starring Larry David, one of the creators of the eponymous Seinfeld show of the early 90s. I recently had a chance to watch the first season of the show on DVD (three seasons are currently available) and I found it a bit of a mixed bag.
The premise of Curb Your Enthusiasm fairly simple. We follow David through his everyday life and laugh at his bungled interactions with his (much too hot for this guy) wife, his agent, his neighbors, various minor celebrities, and people he meets in his doctor's office or at dinner parties. So, yes, this is Seinfeld. That is, it's Seinfeld if you subtract out all the main characters from Seinfeld except George, move the show to LA, and focus less on the single-ness of the characters (they aren't single in Curb Your Enthusiasm-land) and more on how truly annoying everyone on the show is.
Don't get me wrong about this. I loved Seinfeld, and while Curb Your Enthusiasm might be the the best of work of any Seinfeld alum, it isn't great. And that's where this DVD truly fails. While one or two episodes can elicit a great deal of laughs, when you string the episodes back-to-back, things go downhill fairly quickly. So, in moderation Curb Your Enthusiasm gets my recommendation, but don't plan on spending an evening spinning through all the episodes; you'll grow tired of David fairly quickly.
Posted by david at November 9, 2004 02:44 PM