Welcome to a new Sitcom Tuesday! This week, we’re continuing our coverage of Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000-2011; 2017-2024, HBO), which is currently available on DVD and MAX.

Curb Your Enthusiasm stars LARRY DAVID as Larry David. With CHERYL HINES as Cheryl David, JEFF GARLIN as Jeff Greene, and SUSIE ESSMAN as Susie Greene.

Season Three of Curb Your Enthusiasm is the start of what I would call the show’s peak era. After a very forward-moving second year that elevated the series’ understanding of how to project its identity — with an ideal calibration of focus and spontaneity, plus the right application of situation-affirming story — Larry David and company are now off to the races, yielding a collection that’s the strongest yet. It’s best defined by its chosen arc, which finds Larry attempting to go into the restaurant industry alongside Jeff, Ted Danson, Michael York, and a host of others. This isn’t exactly a show business idea that inherently plays into the situation by suggesting the kind of broken-fourth-wall-sensibility favored by both this series’ premise and its visual aesthetic, but the setup alone allows a few of Larry’s celebrity friends to play themselves and maintain that same type of winking meta ethos. What’s more, it’s also a venue for a handful of plots that showcase the Larry David character well, for his petty and tactless persona is smartly applied in an environment with a lot of naturally arising problems. So, while I think Curb is optimal with a storyline more centered in the behind-the-curtain world that the series’ design intrinsically enables, this is nevertheless one of the most fruitful seasonal frameworks of the entire run. Of course, Three is also firing on all cylinders with its episodic storytelling — getting into the groove with its individual comic ideas and the clever plotting that interconnects them, enabling hilarious payoffs. Accordingly, the show puts itself in the exact right conditions to yield greatness — an excellence that will continue and (for my money) even improve during Season Four, which we’ll discuss more next week… In the meantime, I would just like to note that although I’m not fully comfortable ranking a series with only ten episodes against all the other full sitcom seasons we’ve covered from 2002-2003, I have to say, purely based on overall comedic and narrative strength, and taking into account each show’s own trajectory relative to its self-determined success, I think Curb is a leading candidate for the year’s best. The episodes I’ve picked below in illustration of this season’s high quality should prove why.

 

01) Episode 23: “Club Soda And Salt” (Aired: 09/29/02)

Larry is jealous of Cheryl’s new tennis partner.

Directed by Robert B. Weide

This outing may not be as memorable as the others below, but it’s a terrifically funny showing that helps to evidence the high baseline of quality existing throughout Season Three. In fact, “Club Soda And Salt” boasts a lot of what makes this series unique — namely, a handful of amusing ideas (one of my favorites is Larry’s bathroom exchange with an actor in the immersive Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding, where said actor refuses to break character), and a specific style of storytelling that carefully connects comic notions for big crescendos, like here, when the titled cleaning trick ties everything together. Also, I appreciate that the restaurant arc is utilized as well (this is one of Ted Danson’s best Curb appearances, up there with “Chet’s Shirt”), setting this up as a fine representation of Three, and frankly, just a more seamless ambassador for Curb than any Honorable Mention I could have spotlighted instead. (Laura Silverman guests.)

02) Episode 27: “The Corpse-Sniffing Dog” (Aired: 10/27/02)

Larry tries to help when Jeff is allergic to his family’s dog.

Directed by Andy Ackerman

A well-plotted episode with several amusing story ideas, this entry is simply another strong example of Curb’s identity-projection at this high point in its run, with Larry being the unlucky victim of fateful happenstance and, mostly, his own personality flaws that create such misfortune. Although the offering is probably best remembered for the story with Sammi — who accidentally gets drunk while with Larry — and the Greenes’ dog Oscar, a frequent menace to Larry, I think the most situation-based, charactery stuff occurs in the story with Amy Aquino (Cookie Lady from Everybody Loves Raymond), who is offended when Larry says that the money her husband (Don Stark of That ’70s Show) earns is not her money. That’s the kind of conflict that works well for Larry, given the arrangement between him and Cheryl. Also, I appreciate how the restaurant arc is continued here, rendering this a great sample of the season.

03) Episode 28: “Krazee-Eyez Killa” (Aired: 11/03/02)

Larry learns that Wanda’s fiancé is cheating on her.

Directed by Robert B. Weide

One of the funniest installments of the entire series, “Krazee-Eyez Killa” has fun exploiting Larry’s general uncomfortableness with African Americans, who heighten the social stakes of his usual faux pas — something that the show will deploy for a full arc in Season Six, when the Blacks arrive. Here, he’s caught between Wanda (Sykes) and her cheating fiancé (Chris Williams), a rapper who confides in Larry about the outside sexual proclivities that he’s yet to curb. This is cleverly interwoven with a story that continues the mini-arc of Larry being cast in a Martin Scorsese film, as the former needs to find a particular jacket that he must wear for retakes of a specific scene. Together, these ideas converge for so many great moments and big laughs — proof of how, despite the aesthetic shift away from traditional sitcommery in HBO’s style (discussed two weeks ago), Curb itself is primarily interested in comedy, the very thing that allows it to be an excellent addition to the genre and one of this era’s finest. A favorite, an MVE contender. (Note: Robert B. Weide won an Emmy for his direction of this outing.)

04) Episode 30: “The Grand Opening” (Aired: 11/17/02)

Larry prepares for the grand opening of his restaurant.

Directed by Robert B. Weide

My choice for this season’s Most Valuable Episode (MVE), “The Grand Opening” is one of the absolute, most perfect half hours in all of Curb Your Enthusiasm, and indeed, by calling it my choice for the best from one of the show’s best collections (I think it’s the second-best collection, frankly, behind only Season Four), that’s high praise, for it’s not without its competition. However, this is hard to beat, both comedically and narratively, for the plot effortlessly builds to the climactic opening of Larry’s restaurant — the arc that develops through all of Season Three and is now ready for, basically, a pay-off. Its episodic setup is great here too, with Paul Sand and Paul Willson both turning in stellar guest performances — the former as the last-minute chef, whose involuntary cursing proves to be an obstacle, given the layout of the venue, and the latter as an influential critic whom quick-to-anger Larry maims in a dodgeball feud. Additionally, the use of Larry’s favorable bias towards bald men creates a helpful callback that plays well in the crescendo, which turns into an “I’m Spartacus” reference as everyone at the restaurant participates in a joyous forum of profane release — a sequence that not only caps off the plot but also feels like a moment of transcendent, cathartic humor in the classical tradition, evidencing the show’s main selling point as a reliable font of hilarious ideas that are well-applied. (Incidentally, I also love the subplot with Cheryl vs. Susie — it makes room for an expert bit of physical comedy at a car wash that yields maybe Cheryl’s best work ever on the series, and it also ties into the final restaurant scene as well.) Now, this is not as metatheatrical and therefore as inherently situation-validating as some of the other classics that we have and will be highlighting as MVEs, but with extra big laughs and some brilliant, never-better storytelling, this is definitely on the short list of Curb’s most “Curb” samples. A gem.

 

Other episodes in consideration for the above list include: “Chet’s Shirt,” the season premiere, which sets up the restaurant arc and has a lot of really strong comic ideas that are smartly linked together, and “The Special Section,” which introduces Shelley Berman and Richard Kind as Larry’s father and cousin, respectively. Also, I don’t love them, but “The Nanny From Hell” notably guests Cheri Oteri, and “Mary, Joseph, And Larry” has a memorable climax.

 

*** The MVE Award for the Best Episode from Season Three of Curb Your Enthusiasm goes to…

“The Grand Opening”

 

 

Come back next week for Season Four! And stay tuned for a new Wildcard Wednesday!