I’ve always prefered Curb Your Enthusiasm to Seinfeld. It boasts the same ingenious domino effect-style writing but with a vulgar, cantankerous prick at the wheel. I can’t say that the anticipation I feel in regards to the upcoming ninth season is wholly of the positive sort, considering writer, actor and showrunner Larry David intended season 8 to be the finale of the series. However, executive producer Jeff Schaffer did well assuaging my reservations in his recent sit down with Variety about what fans can expect when the show returns to HBO on October 1st.
The first comforting tidbit to come out of the interview was that the six-year gap between season 8 and 9 would be addressed at the forefront of the new season - in fact, whatever it was Larry was up to during that time will drive the first half of the new season's arc. Apparently he’s been stewing, “hoarding indiscretions like scrooge mcduck” and season nine will be the ultimate pay off for Larry’s infamous pettiness.
This will not be the only manner in which time influences the show’s erratic narrative , as Schaffer teases that the current political climate will play some role in season 9, though he hastened to clarify strictly in a comedic sense; “ Curb is still a monument to the supreme power of not giving a fuck about anything other than what’s funny. The show always works when there’s this big thing and then there’s this little thing that undermines the big thing,” he said in the interview.
It’s odd that nearly 17 years after its release, it brings me more ease than disquiet to learn that Curb Your Enthusiasm’s ninth season is likely to feature more of the same. I mean every episode of Curb is defined by this sort of inevitable rhythm, yet they manage to avoid feeling stale. It’s predictability is an organic one. A darkly humorous commentary on the unavoidable delicate often problematic beats of life. Schaffer speaks on this, and the writing process this time around:
“Nothing changed for us in terms of how the show got written because it was just talking about all of the awkward situations we’d been in and turned them into situations for the show, but when we got back to shooting there was a bit of an adjustment. The one thing I think the five years did do is we lost the sense of how many stories go in a show,” he told Variety. “We wrote more, and then when you get on set, every scene is a live rewrite, so we shot more, and that means the shows are all just longer. Not slow, but dense and full of information. So maybe that muscle, the muscle that governs what length a show should be, needed to be flexed.”
Curb Your Enthusiasm returns to HBO October 1st.
