With a parade of callbacks and a twist a quarter-century in the making, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the HBO series starring Larry David as a heightened version of himself, ended its 20-plus-year run on Sunday.
The final episode, which referenced the polarizing 1998 finale of “Seinfeld,” David’s previous show, was replete with the usual out-of-bounds commentary and cranky fixation on minutiae; David and his co-stars — Jeff Garlin, Susie Essman, J.B. Smoove, Richard Lewis — do not, by creative mandate, change. (“I’m 76 years old, and I have never learned a lesson in my entire life,” David tells a child in the episode, in the opposite of a teachable moment.) In real life, though, the cast are longtime friends, and have weathered much together, including the death of Lewis, who played himself, in February.
On Monday, Jeff Schaffer, the longtime executive producer and director, and Essman — who portrayed Susie Greene, the scene-stealing, expletive-hurling wife of David’s manager (Garlin) — got together for a post-mortem video interview about the series that, they said, changed their lives. Essman was in her home in New York, and Schaffer, who got his start as a writer on “Seinfeld,” was in the “Curb” offices in Los Angeles, where a sign on the wall behind him, hanging askew, read: “No defecation please.” (It was a prop from Latte Larry’s, the “spite store” that David’s character opened to malign a neighboring coffee shop, Schaffer said. “And it’s a sentiment I feel is as true now as it was then.”)
Essman and Schaffer spoke about filming their final moments with Lewis, how the characters could live on, and why the “Seinfeld” finale idea led to the end of the series. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.
When did you conceive of the finale?
JEFF SCHAFFER It was July of ’22. We were writing the season — we weren’t that far — and we knew that we were starting with Georgia. [In the season premiere, David’s character gets arrested for giving a woman water while she waits to vote in defiance of a local election law.] When you start with a crime, one of the possibilities is a trial. So that was floating around, one of the many paths that we could go down.
And we were just talking about a little story, of Larry not wanting to be involved in a kid’s lesson. We talk out the scene and distill it down to a few lines. In character, he said, “I’m 75 years old, I’ve never learned a thing in my life.” And that was the moment for us where we said, “Hold on a second, what if we just blew that up and just told everybody: ‘Larry’s never learned his lesson,’ and just did the ‘Seinfeld’ trial again?” Just owned it. Like, we know what you thought of that, and we don’t care. We’ve learned nothing. We’re going right at it. We’re steering the Titanic right back at the iceberg.
So it was a way to get the last word on the “Seinfeld” critics? Online, someone called it a “spite finale.”
SUSIE ESSMAN [Laughing] Oh, that’s good.
SCHAFFER It was convenient because it felt like a trial was coming, and we could do something very funny with that. But the thing that I love the most about it is that it was ambitious in its laziness. It was progressive in its intransigence, and it was unique for its repetition. In the end, it was bigger than the show: It was about Larry’s contrary DNA, and it made a fitting end to the series that way. It felt right.
That’s when we started to tell people that this was going to be the final season, because redoing the “Seinfeld” finale only works if it’s the “Curb” finale. So the comedy of the story forced the ending.
ESSMAN So when you started working on Season 12, you weren’t aware that it was going to be the final season?
SCHAFFER He was talking about that it was going to be, but I wasn’t sure I believed that. I mean, every season, we’re writing together, he’s looked at me: “Maybe we’ll only do eight [episodes] this year!” That was the normal cosmic wave background of Larry realizing that writing is hard. None of that really registered. But when we did this, this is planting the flag for the right reason, a comedy reason.
Then we went back — just to answer your question, which I rarely do; I’m sorry — we went back and started seeding things about the finale, about “Seinfeld,” I think not realizing that once we said the word “trial,” everyone was going there anyway. And that was OK. It was OK for people to go, like, “They’re really doing this!” It was like watching any scene of the show: Oh my God, I can’t believe he’s doing this. He’s going to talk to the gay guys about whose semen it is. Oh my God, he’s going to talk about the suicide. Oh my God, oh my God. Same thing, just writ large for the season. I like that we got people all the way to the edge.
One thing Larry has talked about, as his comedy philosophy, is taking something big, like death, and treating it like a minor thing, and blowing something small way out of proportion. Is that a philosophy that you can see others getting attached to?
ESSMAN I would not recommend that people use Larry as a role model.
SCHAFFER Larry always says that it’s more fun to play Larry David than it is to be Larry David. Because if the real Larry David did what the TV Larry David does, the real Larry David would be in jail and have a broken jaw from getting punched repeatedly in the face. That’s why he does the show.
What did you learn from working on this show?
SCHAFFER Larry taught me how to write and how to look at comedy, in a story-specific way, and also how to be fearless. If you think it’s funny, it’s funny; and not worry about everybody else. Larry’s also taught me, from a writing standpoint — he can just start. In the beginning of the season, the cupboard can be pretty bare. He said, “Let’s see what’s around,” and he’ll start making a soup out of all the ingredients. He’s just not afraid to jump in.
ESSMAN They are really hard workers. Eight, nine months putting the outline together, and editing for eight, nine months, every day for 12 hours a day. So anybody who just thinks, they’re funny and they just make this happen — they work really diligently and hard at it.
Susie, your character is kind of fearless too. Including in her outfits.
ESSMAN We put together this Fiorucci outfit. I don’t know if it really read because I was sitting on the plane. But we were very conscious of, this is the last time you’re going to see Susie. There’s no such thing as too big, too angry [for the character]; just put it out there. There are times when I would do something really big and Larry or Jeff would say, pull it back a little bit. Fine; I could always pull it back. But you have to be fearless and put it all out, and not be judging yourself when you’re doing it and second-guessing and having a little elf on your shoulder, watching and commenting. You just have to just trust it and go with it.
SCHAFFER There are things that come out of these people’s mouths that you never expected. You have a plan every day, how you’re going to shoot something; every day, you throw half of that out the window, because there’s something better.
ESSMAN That is the great joy of this show: that we don’t know what it is yet and we just do it. And I would say 95 percent of the time it works. Maybe even 100 percent.
Where did Larry and Jerry Seinfeld’s exchange about dating the bearded lady come from?
SCHAFFER It was a funny thing that Larry wanted to talk about at some point. We tried putting it in some other scene, and it was just like, let’s go with Jerry, because we wanted that scene to just be, here’s two old friends making each other laugh. And we get to see, hey, maybe this is how “Seinfeld” was created, just these two guys making up hypotheticals.
Do you want to talk about Richard Lewis?
SCHAFFER We did a reshoot, three weeks before he passed — that scene in the courthouse. I was so glad that he was there for that and that everyone got to be together. He got to finish the show with us.
ESSMAN That was so important to him. He was just the funniest, sweetest — nobody else like him.
I laughed my way through the episode, and I didn’t feel very sentimental, which feels like what you might have envisioned, right?
ESSMAN Yes, absolutely. You shouldn’t feel very sentimental. It’s not a sentimental show!
SCHAFFER You know what’s so interesting — that final scene [in the plane], you know, everyone’s bickering, going at it. We covered it from a whole bunch of angles. And there was a suite of shots that was panning off everyone arguing, to Larry, or pushing in on Larry. Larry and I were looking at that in the edit room, ending on Larry, and he just says, “This isn’t right; we should end on everybody.”
And he was so right, because when you end it on Larry, it started to feel maudlin, and that’s not what we wanted. We wanted to see all of our people. It was the perfect way to go out, because they left us as they came to us: arguing.
And it made you feel like this is how they will always be, right? It’s literally the alpha and omega of bickering — that’s it. Whatever the audience feels, the audience feels. But our people didn’t feel bummed, because it’s not the end. They’re going to do this forever.
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