Curb Your Enthusiasm celebrates 20 years

The Independent

Larry David's acclaimed HBO comedy premiered on Oct. 15, 2000 with "The Pants Tent" one year after he starred in the HBO mockumentary Larry David: Curb Your Enthusiasm. Curb is still going strong two decades later, with Season 11 about to begin production. "Celebrities had parodied themselves before on TV – including in HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show, itself an influence on Curb – but David’s sitcom helped popularize the practice, flinging open the floodgates for series like Entourage, Extras and Episodes," says Louis Chilton. "Curb’s auteurist bent and verite style was a precursor to shows like Louie; and there’s more than a little Larry David in Hannah Horvath’s self-righteous social dysfunction in Girls. But Curb remains largely the same as it ever was." Noting that Curb has been more popular than Seinfeld in Britain, Chilton adds: "Seinfeld was frequently billed as the 'show about nothing' – what did that make Curb? The first episode ('The Pants Tent') revolved around the slightest of premises: an argument in which a fold in Larry’s trousers is mistaken for an erection. Subsequent episodes would fixate, like Seinfeld, on the minutiae of everyday life, on the myriad unspoken rules and petty injustices that colour our daily lives. But where Seinfeld became known for its relatability, Curb filtered its observations about modern life through the warped, truculent psyche of Larry himself." ALSO: Curb and Gilmore Girls, which is also celebrating its 20th anniversary this month, share the same executive producer: Gavin Polone.