Note: The following story contains spoilers from “Curb Your Enthusiasm” Season 12, Episode 10.
As many suspected, Sunday night’s series finale of “Curb Your Enthusiasm” replicated the wildly divisive 1998 “Seinfeld” ending, in which the main characters were found guilty — essentially for being terrible people — and sent to jail.
It was either “impressively meta” or a reason to turn off the TV for fans. In the “Curb” finale, Larry David was sentenced to a year in jail for violating Georgia’s voting law. The jury was swayed to convict by the endless stream of anecdotes about Larry behaving badly, which provided a “greatest hits”of flashbacks to incidents from the show, including him attacking a swan and teaching a child to put a swastika on a handkerchief.
“Larry David not using the series finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm to fix the series finale of Seinfeld, but instead Repeating It, has to be the most Larry David thing ever,” wrote @Fairwinds10 on X.
But David indeed addressed the divisiveness of the “Seinfeld” finale in the final moments of “Curb,” as Jerry Seinfeld helped Larry declare a mistrial leading to his freedom. While leaving prison, they both agreed this is how their NBC comedy series should’ve ended all those years ago.
“The finale of Curb is impressively meta. Doing a character trial finale feels like Larry David the person and the character are both saying ‘Oh you didn’t like the Seinfeld finale? Eat it!,’” joked @JLCauvin.
Another fan called it, “A perfect send off to Curb Your Enthusiasm, one of the greatest shows of all time. To everyone who hates the Seinfeld finale this is for you. And for everyone who loves the Seinfeld finale it’s for you even more. It was all pretty pretttyyyy good.”
But several were not happy for the “been there, done that” plot retread.
“I feel I’ve already seen this, 26 years ago. I’m old, I can’t waste my life on this. I’ve switched away,” tweeted David Rustin.
“Not even Larry David seems to care about the Curb Your Enthusiasm finale. The only good part was Leon’s Seinfeld review,” wrote Kleinman.
In the finale, Leon, played by J.B. Smoove, told Larry he’d finally watched “Seinfeld,” and considered it “a show about weekly a–, more of a f–k documentary.”
Here are more reactions from social media: