Fans of Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle might disagree, but three tuba notes have never heralded such joy in entertainment as the opening-theme oompah of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
It has permeated popular culture to the point where another piece of incidental Curb music has popped up in, irony of ironies, a Cheerios commercial.
After two years away, Larry David’s litany to self-loathing is back on HBO, and the series picks with such airy ease, it’s as though it never even left.
Curb Your Enthusiasm Puts Larry David In Perfect Place As Seventh Season Opens
Even in a quasi-slump – as Curb had been in prior to season six – David’s intricate irritations were, at worst, worth a slight snicker. Both inspired and not inspired by the deteriorating marriage in David’s actual life, the chasm in his Curb marriage quickly filled nay widening gaps in the series.
The impeccable opening salvo for the series’ seventh season shows that Larry’s momentary Christmas-card joy with Loretta (Vivica A. Fox) and the Blacks (the family he housed after Hurricane Katrina) has wilted to impatience and misery.
The chicken soup Larry makes Loretta is over-salted. His ideal room temperature clashes with hers – a stance on which Leon (the incomparable J.B. Smoove, entering a room ready for conversational combat) for once does not have his back. Auntie Rae (Ellia English) saunters in the house kvetching about neighborhood thieves. Larry prefers thieves to neighbors – after all, the former robs of you things, not time.
As a wacky Fox sitcom – which the staging of these opening scenes resembles – this would be awful. In David’s hands, it’s a ticking time bomb, and the series’ improvisational structure only adds to the sheer lack of predictability.
Larry David Stuffs Latest Premiere of Curb Your Enthusiasm With Delicious Bits
Not surprisingly, even the nicest gestures toward Larry devolve into grotesque social discomfort. This particular episode of Curb plays like a blockbuster of bad behavior, and what it packs into 30 minutes is miraculous – refrigerator intrusion, mental instability, dinner party-invitation etiquette and unexpectedly gay doctors.
Every savory moment is emblematic of social contracts from which Larry thinks the ink began flaking long ago, and the conflation of these plotlines is, as usual, a beautiful disaster.
As the episode's title character (Funkhouser’s Crazy Sister), Catherine O’Hara perfectly plays it husky-voiced and addle-brained. It’s no time at all before she lures Larry’s agent, Jeff (Jeff Garlin, at his best when able to cut loose as he does in this episode), into a loathsome act. It’s definitive proof that no one should ever present an empty gesture to the terminally sincere Funkhouser family. (Bob Einstein returns as Marty Funkhouser, whose family’s crest no doubt is a picture of Larry with head in hands.)
Even When Larry David Acts – Gasp! – Human, This Curb Your Enthusiasm Episode Works
Funkhouser’s Crazy Sister works even as it makes Larry the clear conscience of a situation or – in an unlikely encounter with estranged wife Cheryl (Cheryl Hines) – a genuinely emotional human.
Reducing the level of Larry in her life appeals to Cheryl, but that’s the last thing that would satisfy the series’ viewers. The seventh season hasn’t even yet gotten to its much-ballyhooed development – a pseudo-Seinfeld reunion featuring Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander and Michael Richards – and it already feels like it’s at full stride.
Welcome back, Larry.
Nick Rogers - Nick Rogers has been an editor and writer in the fields of arts & entertainment and features for the past 13 years. This isn't surprising ...
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