The Four Best CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM Episodes of Seasons Three & Four

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The Four Best CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM Episodes of Season Three

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.

The Four Best CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM Episodes of Season Four

Although Curb has a period of excellence that lasts beyond one ten-episode season, I think this is the peak of the peak. Like Three, this year operates under the most favorable conditions with regard to the show’s ability to project its identity in performance, as episodes maintain the finest balance of focused spontaneity, neither feeling too written (as later years will be) nor, as in earlier seasons, too much like an improvisational exercise. This means that Larry David’s complicated storytelling, where many comedic ideas are woven together in cohesive narratives built for connected crescendos, plays with intended ease, supported by a cushioning and situation-corroborating sense of veritas. But what vaults Four even above the otherwise impressive Three is that this year’s chosen arc is an even better representation of the series’ situation — it’s a show business setup with exactly the kind of metatheatricality Curb was conceived and designed to offer, as people like Mel Brooks and David Schwimmer play themselves when Larry David rehearses for a production of The Producers musical.