Curb Your Enthusiasm debuted on Amazon Prime streaming this month after a long time hidden behind HBO’s subscription-based paywall, and it’s in good company: Seinfeld entered the streaming game via Hulu earlier this summer as well. As a result, I have valiantly been watching both shows for you, and I’m ready to say with some certainty that, well, they’re basically the same show. Except Curb Your Enthusiasm is about married people, and Seinfeld is about singles.
Curb Your Enthusiasm Is For Lovers
Everybody knows that Curb is a lot like Seinfeld. After all, it was created by and stars Larry David, the co-creator of Seinfeld, and is essentially about him being a rich, eccentric, fussy weirdo. Basically, he plays some weird combination of Jerry and George combined. The show’s plots will feel familiar to Seinfeld fans, too: They tend to focus on mundane, everyday situations. It’s another show about nothing. But it has more of an emphasis on awkward situations, rather than interlocking ones. It’s Seinfeld combined with a comedy of manners.
But the biggest difference is that Larry, and most of his friends, are married. Those who aren’t (Richard Lewis) talk a lot about how they want to be (Richard Lewis). The key dynamic of Curb season 1, which is what I’m up to so far on my rewatch, is between Larry and Cheryl; even the buddy-relationship with Jeff is still in its early stages at this point. Over the long term, the Larry-and-Cheryl relationship remains the heart of the show (until the divorce plotline, anyway), and Jeff’s marriage—as well as Ted Danson’s—become more prominent.
Sure, you could say that Curb is Seinfeld with rich people, or Seinfeld with Los Angeles pople. But I think those are window trappings. The heart of the show is Larry’s marriage, and that’s a subject that’s barely broached in Seinfeld. George’s engagement is the closest we get, but he’s trying to get out of that as soon as it happens. That’s how Curb manages to feel so much like Seinfeld—it even echoes particular plots sometimes—and so different at the same time. It’s more domestic, and it’s rooted in the home and the family, rather than in a group of friends.
Oh, and, of course, it’s great. Curb is just as funny as Seinfeld, at least if you can stand the awkwardness, and it feels fresh—whereas for some of us (me), Seinfeld is very old hat. I’ve seen it a million times. But Curb is newer, less constrained, and less filtered. You should definitely watch it. It’s on Amazon now, so, uh, get to it.
