Simon Boccanegra

Meh. I liked the Jeff/Larry exchanges in which they "talked about nothing." Bill Hader was good as the three probably related guys, although the material wasn't so hot. Tracey Ullman, likewise. But I didn't think this one was very good. "Fun fact": This is the third episode titled "Someone, Someone and Someone." Season 3 had "Mary, Joseph and Larry," and season 10 had "Elizabeth, Margaret and Larry." And all three were near the end of a season. Garlin sounded unusually hoarse this week. Maybe he had been screaming at HR people. The Young Larry plot that's supposed to tie the season together came out of the gate strong in the first few episodes, but it hasn't been threaded through in a satisfying way. I know there's a finale still to come, but I was looking forward to the show finding more humor in Larry trying to make a sitcom in 2021 for a streaming service. The problem with having all the old episodes on HBO Max to dip into randomly through the week is that when a routine gets reused, it's fresh in my mind instead of something dimly recalled from 2006. A funnier version of the "resting or sleeping?" argument was in the season 7 premiere. Larry got into it with Auntie Rae when she said Loretta (who had cancer) was "resting" and she wouldn't disturb her. The Greenes have such a peculiar marriage. Susie goes into rages even to the point of assaulting Antoinette's elderly mother when she suspects Jeff of being unfaithful, although Susie too has been shown sleeping around. She verbally abuses him, but he stays with her because she says she'll bankrupt him and make him rue the day he met her if he mentions divorce. But if he buys her a new vase (or elective surgery, or house) he can get back into her good graces for a while when she uncovers his latest affair...assuming the normal version that calls him a fat fuck is "good graces." It was weird to me that they were chatting in bed in their last scene. I was expecting him to be living in a hotel for a while, as he has in the past when they had a big flare-up.

Aside from her own sketch/variety show (one of Fox's first four prime-time series, and the only successful one aside from Married with Children), I've mostly seen Ullman giving "straight" performances in supporting roles: the Meryl Streep movie Plenty, the Kenneth Lonergan-written miniseries version of Howards End in which she played Aunt Juley, Woody Allen's Bullets over Broadway. Bullets was a comedy, but Ullman's part called for more realistic acting, compared to the larger-than-life characters played by Dianne Wiest and Jennifer Tilly. What she's doing on Curb is a good balance between realism and farce. She has an impressive range.

Yeah, "Denise Handicapped" was a good one. I've been skipping around a lot, watching the old ones. Some of them I know so well, and others I only saw maybe twice, years ago. Yesterday I watched "The Ida Funkhouser Roadside Memorial," in which Larry gets into an argument at the ice-cream store with a woman played by Robin Bartlett, who's trying sample after sample and holding up the line. Unfortunately, she turns out to be the dean of the school that the Greenes are trying to get Sammy into and the Davids are trying to get the Black children into. He tries to make up with everyone by stealing three bouquets from Marty's newly-deceased mom's memorial: one for Cheryl, one for Loretta, and one for Robin the dean to go with an in-person apology. But Marty has been counting the bouquets and realizes three are missing, and of course, that's just the beginning of the hijinks. I hate to say it, but when I watch the old episodes, even though I've seen them before, I laugh more than I do at the new ones. I love those scenes in which Cheryl gently punctures Larry's bullshit. C: "Just say I'm sorry, we love the school, and... and leave." L (condescendingly): "You don't need to tell me how to apologize to people. I've been apologizing to people since I'm six years old on a daily basis. I pretty much have it down." C: "And is it always effective? Your apologies?" L (uncomfortable pause): "Pretty effective."

My take is that Susie has a bunch of mostly offscreen friendships (people we only meet when they come into Larry's orbit -- such as Bridget, the Lauren Graham character with whom she fixed him up). Those other people, such as Deidre, just perceive Susie as this funny, warm Jewish lady who's a doting mom with an offbeat fashion sense. Maybe every once in a while they see her temper when a store clerk is unpleasant or she's talking about something Jeff did/didn't do, but she isn't screaming at them all the time. But we mostly get her reacting to Jeff and Larry, so...

When Larry and Leon were driving and he got a text from Cheryl about needing House Husband, they held for a while on Larry's phone screen and it said "Cheryl Hines." There's some debate as to whether that was a goof or whether -- in the world of the show -- "Hines" is Cheryl's maiden name and she's gone back to it. It doesn't seem like the kind of thing that would be done thoughtlessly. I don't recall ever hearing her maiden name to contradict it. I don't recall either of her parents ever getting a first name, let alone a last one. They were always just credited as "Cheryl's Mom" and "Cheryl's Dad" at the end. (Now, anyone want to go deep trivia and tell me, "In the episode about the Christ nail, Larry calls the mother Beverly"?) Now, I can easily tell you Cheryl's dead aunt's full name, because there was a detailed obituary. Louise Hoenin, devoted sister, beloved...uh, aunt!

A couple decades worth of CYE guests talk about their experiences and the improvisation process. Kightlinger: "It didn’t stay in, but at the end, when Jon Hamm was yelling [at Albert Brooks, for hoarding pandemic supplies] and saying, 'How could you do that?' Albert said, 'Mad Men doesn’t hold up!!!'" https://www.theringer.com/tv/2021/11/19/22789464/curb-your-enthusiasm-cameos-oral-history

Occasionally we see him giving in to pressure or listening to the voice that says "Do the nice thing" when it's something he doesn't want to do. Calling a bigwig in the TV business to put in a good word for someone who's trying to change jobs. Helping a blind man move. Finding a pool for a maintenance man and his family to swim in. Donating a kidney -- it was one of his closest friends, but he was reluctant and went to great lengths to get out of it. The show's point of view seems to be that ingratitude, persecution, and misery are our lot, the inevitable consequence of any choice.

Five adaptations! He named four Jo Marches of movies plus Susan Dey, of the three-hour-plus '78 miniseries. Yeah, he had that "lying Larry" voice. On the background of eleven seasons of him, there's no way I believe he spent more than eleven hours on Little Women just to make a better impression on Deidre. He probably just memorized the names of the Jos. I dunno. We've seen evidence in the past that Jeff leverages his "successful Hollywood agent" status to further his extramarital shenanigans. One example is that beautiful actress who was new to L.A. and wanted Larry to go with her to the incest group. Jeff was slurping scotch in a hotel room with her and then getting them into a drunk road accident within about an hour of meeting her. The stars whom Jeff has name-dropped, either as existing clients or as people he's meeting with to discuss it, suggest he is supposed to be something of a power player in Curb-world. So that's how I assumed it went. "Have you ever acted? You have an incredible look! You remind me of [brunette It Girl from the '90s] when I first saw her. Are you doing anything after work? I'd love to talk about it!"

That. The producer of Ullman's show was James L. Brooks (of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Terms of Endearment, etc.), and Brooks asked Groening to create an animated family for short segments. Ullman wasn't creatively involved in that part of her show. Just after The Tracey Ullman Show ran its course in the early '90s, Ullman sued Fox (not Brooks or Groening), because she felt the language in her contract entitled her to a share of the enormous profits from merchandising of the Simpsons characters. The jury sided with the network.

Madeline Wise was Deidre. She looked familiar to me, but I haven't actually seen any of the other things on her IMDb. Irma did imply that she wasn't at all physically attracted to Larry, but was willing to "get past" the surface if he could get along with her daughter. So maybe it's a combination of her being less superficial than Larry is and also her having the 13-year dry spell she so graphically described. I don't know if it's a mood I was in, or they reminded me of a couple for whom I sat through long, grueling, saccharine-sweet, very TMI vows (yes...partly that), or what, but I couldn't stand Deidre and Scott. I hated them as much as I hated the couple in season 1 who demanded to meet Julia Louis-Dreyfus before they would sign the paper to get the wire buried. Horatio Sanz played the plumber. There's an entire SNL cast to be made up of past Curb guest stars who were on SNL earlier in their careers: Ana Gasteyer, Brad Hall, Tim Kazurinsky, Michael McKean, Tim Meadows, Kevin Nealon, Laraine Newman, Cheri Oteri, Chris Parnell, Martin Short, David Spade. And Julia Louis-Dreyfus, but it's hard for me to think of her in the same group. That may not even be a complete list. I'm sure this episode was in the can and ready to go before August of this year, but I'm glad Sanz didn't have a bigger role. He's accused of sexual assault and related crimes dating back to his SNL days. Edit: Speaking of timing, I'm so glad I have no stake in the fortunes of Peloton. The dust hasn't even settled from And Just Like That... and now they're implicated in Larry's ball-bruising experience.

Linus, with slightly different wording.

I've seen Ullman act in a more subdued register, so I wasn't that surprised that I completely bought her as a low-level SoCal pol, even if it isn't what I would expect Larry to use her for. "She's a multi...multi-talented!" (to be read in the voice of Catherine O'Hara as Bam-Bam Funkhouser)

Lewis wasn't going to be in this season at all (recovering from back and shoulder surgeries), but he was well enough to shoot for one day near the end of the production schedule. He was happy about that. He'd already announced on his social media, with regret, that he would have to miss season 11. That scene with Larry might be all of him this season.

The amount of the settlement too. The settlement Jimmy Bennett received from Argento and Anthony Bourdain was $380,000. I did assume that that was the real-life correspondence to the story, and that the story was revealing of Larry David's feelings about it. It's one of the rare bits this season that seemed obviously "ripped from the headlines" (all right, headlines of 2018), along with Harrelson's riff on Joaquin Phoenix's Oscar speech.

The negative: I think I'm doomed to find this season "off" in a way no previous one has been. The setups themselves (including big multi-episode ones, like the Maria Sofia blackmail dilemma and the ways Larry tries to get out from under it) are rickety, and sometimes scenes just aren't playing to their potential. Larry happening to show up at a house where Cheryl and Susie are having their book club...great! Tell me that scene is coming and I can't wait to see what happens. But the improvisations and humor that followed...not great. And often, what does work is just a callback to something that was funny in an earlier episode, such as Larry's "campaign promise" about people no longer being allowed to say Happy New Year after January 7th. The positive: Outstanding guest cast in this one. They brought the episode up to being one of the better ones of the season. There was Ullman, of course, but everyone else popped too. The "widow." The big guy who answered the door and was loving everything Larry claimed the candidate stood for. The prop guy and his wife. The young guy in the voting line answering Larry's hypotheticals about having sex with the gorgeous actress and getting $400,000 in the bargain. The older guy with whom Larry struck the deal. Even the extras at Mayhew's campaign HQ at the end were such great faces. Re: Jon Rudnitsky, the actor playing Asa/"Young Larry." He was on SNL for a season, and he's done a lot of movies and TV. This isn't his first time on Curb. He played a waiter in "Namaste" in season 9.

Whatever plot runs through the season has always been loosely applied, with a lot of digressions. There are episodes in season 3 that have little to do with the restaurant, in season 4 that have little to do with The Producers, and in season 9 that have little to do with either Fatwa! or the fatwa. For instance, if you watch "The Car Pool Lane" or "Wandering Bear" and you don't know/remember which season they're from, you might think they could be from any of the first five. Except for his telling Antoinette to pick up sheet music from Mel's office for him in "Wandering Bear," I don't think there's anything in them that references or advances the Larry-takes-Broadway plot. And it's been a while, but I don't think there's anything that advances the plot of Larry trying to find a woman to cheat with before his wedding anniversary, which was the other arc that season. Unrelated: Susie Essman promises that the last four episodes of the season are "off the charts."

I've only had one. She was in a practice with a few male partners, and I saw all of them at various times. Unless you had a preference, you got the optometrist who had the most convenient opening. The funny thing is that she looked like Cheryl Hines (early-Curb Cheryl), and I remember telling people about it. Anyway, a 2021 article claims that 45.1 percent of practicing optometrists in the U.S. and its territories are female, which is up a point from 2020. Seth and Larry also mentioned urology. That's a really male-dominated specialty, although it used to be even more so.

It was the other way around. Larry asked Victor to come to the Revolutionary War reenactment (which he'd learned about from the talkative gatekeeper at the club) as a way of making up with him for not thanking him for his service. And I could buy that Victor would go along. He was miffed over not being thanked for his service, but he was engaged to Sammi, and he knew this was someone significant in the Greenes' lives. In real life, I do think Larry would be so scandalized by now, even with Seinfeld to his co-credit, that it wouldn't be so easy for him to get project after project going. But I've always been willing to buy into CYE as the kind of sitcom where they go for the laugh and nothing leaves much of a mark by next week. I remember a Simpsons episode in which the family muses in a meta way that no matter what crazy developments happen, they always seem to end up back where they started. That's CYE, more or less. Larry and Cheryl actually going through with the divorce is the only real game-changer the show has ever committed to. Yeah, I've always thought she liked him. In one of her first appearances, she's defending him to her mother-in-law, and she's taken his side several other times. She was really sweet to him when he showed up unannounced after Cheryl left him. She made a place for him at the table, had her arm around him, was saying consoling things. Of course, he then ruined it by complaining that the plate she brought him was smaller than everyone else's plate, and then she started yelling for him to get out. But they just have that bickering dynamic.

The new sitcom starring Alexander and then Louis-Dreyfus didn't happen, but the Seinfeld reunion actually crossed the finish line. Larry himself departed during rehearsals, but the others went ahead. And they appeared to have used the earlier draft Larry wrote before he got jealous and started insisting George and his ex-wife deliver their lines from far apart. So, prior to this season, he was one for two with season-arc TV projects. I guess he was one for two with live theater as well (The Producers made it to opening night; Fatwa! didn't). The obese roofer was Brad Grunberg, who appears to have guest-starred on just about every TV series to have aired between 1990 and now. The tiny driver was Iris Anthony (who looks a little like Laurie Metcalf). She doesn't have a lot of prior credits, and most of the ones she has are shorts (heh). Someone falling through a roof for the punch line of an episode is...well, not the kind of humor I typically associate with this show. I don't know about this season. I still enjoy watching it, but I'm not finding it as funny as any prior season, including the two most recent ones. And it isn't about being offended or feeling the show's humor no longer works in the present era, or anything like that. I just don't find it inspired. It's coasting along being Curb-ish. Maybe LD needed a longer break. Edit: Another example of diminishing returns -- the bit about Harrison Ford being a client of the chiropractor reminded me of the therapist who was all, "I had a client. He was quite an illustrious well-known director. I don't want to reveal who he was, but he did direct Star Wars." But I loved it that just days after I used "plastic over the couch" in this thread as shorthand for the seniors of a prior era, we got that as a set-dressing detail in Young Larry.

I doubt that that will happen; I think late forties/early fifties is where he's settled for his girlfriends-of-the-week. But Aaron was good in the few episodes she did in season 3. She was Cheryl's friend Barbara, a weepy widow whose late husband had the same taste in shirts as Larry. When last seen, she was taking part in the mass cursing at the opening of the new restaurant. I read an interview with her in which she said it was a fond memory, although the improvisation was scary. She loved that Larry had created a character for her, on a show in which some people play themselves.

Personally, when I look again at the early seasons, I think he's physically changed less than everyone else who goes that far back: Cheryl, Jeff, Susie, Richard, Ted. But he never looked "young" in the first place, at least not in his Curb period. Nonetheless, I think Curb has one more season in it at most, and LD's aging (and that of the rest of the cast) is one of the reasons he'll probably let it recede into TV history soon. Bob Einstein is gone. Richard Lewis has had significant health problems. They're alluding to aging more now, for example, with the plot about an acquaintance having dementia, and Lucy not considering Larry sexual anymore because he walked into a door. Comedy is, in large part, founded on being willing to look foolish, but there are limits. Even if HBO keeps giving him this golden deal, I don't think he's going to want to be in his eighties in season 17 running down the sidewalk with a furious ethnic-food proprietor in chase (or whatever).

I wrote "an episode or two," but Cheryl is the only meaningful exception of the ones you list, and she's a core cast member. He doesn't keep a girlfriend for any duration. He and Loretta did crash and burn with an episode or two. There was nothing romantic there for most of season 6. They got together at the very end of the season, and the first two episodes of the next were about him trying to end it. Lauren Graham...okay, she lasted three. I should have said it'll be over within one or two episodes, three if all the stars line up just right. Yes, they've all been younger than he is. So it's a show in which a wealthy, celebrated, famous Hollywood person dates women who are younger than he is (although mature women, as these recent ones have hovered around the 50 mark). For short periods of time, he can get them.

Larry's a "Boomer septuagenarian," though, and they're a new breed. They're more aware of what younger people are into than previous generations were. They hold on to a youthful quality more. Many of them don't want to retire if they still enjoy what they're doing, and in many ways they want still to be in the thick of things, as we see in everything up to and including the ever-increasing ages of presidential candidates. Dianne Wiest (another Boomer actor) has that line in Parenthood about how she can't be a grandmother; grandmothers bake and sew and tell you stories about the Depression! Her generation has changed the way I think of terms such as "grandparent." The elderly relatives I have now are much different from the ones I was taken to visit growing up (The "plastic wrap over the couch"/"Don't touch any of the knickknacks in my parlor" types). I have to remind myself that the current "old people" in my life are the same age as the long-gone ones were at the time. With regard to "age-appropriateness," my feeling is that if we're dealing with actual men and women way past 18 or 21, and there isn't coercion or abuse of power involved, they're the only ones whose opinion of what's appropriate for them matters. Now, there is what I personally would do, but I can't decide for other people and I don't judge them. And really, all of Larry's relationships are going to crash and burn within an episode or two, so there's no point in even getting attached to any of them. It's a revolving door. If the discussion is about actresses in their sixties and seventies whom people think would be funny as new girlfriends for Larry, and they're not getting work because the star and show-runner prefers women 20-25 years younger than he is, then that's something else.

It wouldn't shock me so much in Hollywood. David Lynch's fourth and current wife, for example, is 32 years younger (he's 75, she 43). She's had small acting roles in some of his projects. He had another child by her when he was pushing 70. But it doesn't bother me as a use of guest actors on the show. I think some of the episodes are flat, but I never think, "This would be better if [seventysomething actress of your choice...Kirstie Alley, for example] were his new love interest." It's easier for me to buy Larry attracting good-looking women in their fifties such as Bowen and Liu than it was for me to buy George Costanza getting anywhere with various beauties close to his age on Seinfeld. He wasn't any well-connected multimillionaire in a creative profession. Sometimes he was barely employed...while having George's personality and Jason Alexander's looks. On Japanese restaurant greetings: There was that earlier episode in which the chefs would yell "Chicken teriyaki boy!" and make chicken noises, and Larry would just stand there basking in it. He was so proud of his nickname.

Takahashi is a favorite recurring character of mine, too. (Although he's a sleaze like everyone else on Curb, screwing around with a club member's wife and getting her pregnant.) It's nice that if Larry David likes a bit player, he'll use him again. We've seen it again recently with last season's one-episode hotel clerk (or manager?) coming back as this season's blackmailing taco restaurateur. When Dana Lee played Car Customer #4 in season 2 and was part of the legendary conversation about GTS standing for "Guaranteed Tremendous Safety," he didn't speak with as heavy an accent. So I guess that's a Takahashi trait. Doin' it up 2001 style: The effects do seem to have become more elaborate in the seasons following the big 2011-2017 break. I think of "Thank You for Your Service," in which Larry and Chet Haze's character dress up for a Revolutionary War reenactment and seem to be in real danger because Larry offended someone earlier. That scene was almost on the level of a battle scene in a big-budget film, with canon fire and a large cast of costumed extras running around waving weapons. However, in scenes such as that one and the rain scenes in this Curb, there wasn't a lot of improvisation to be done. Those scenes are exceptions to the bulk of the series: people talking in restaurants, living rooms, medical offices. The actors, regular and guest, have said it's very much a trial-and-error process. They'll do take after take and maybe they'll all be different unless Larry says there's a specific line he definitely wants to hear again.