This interview contains spoilers for the series finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Larry David’s days of terrorizing Brentwood are over. Sunday’s Curb Your Enthusiasm series finale closed the curtain on 12 seasons worth of misanthropic misadventures—and as predicted, the real-life Larry ended the whole affair by orchestrating a redux of his last, highly divisive television series finale.
Below, longtime co-writer/executive producer and director Jeff Schaffer and day-one Curb Your Enthusiasm co-star Susie Essman—who portrays Larry’s poetically profane, sartorially ambitious frienemy Susie Greene—convene to talk about the big Seinfeld plot, the punchline Larry and Jerry came up with on the spot, and just how sentimental the bald guy is about his nearly 25-year long labor of love coming to an end.
How are you guys feeling in terms of the finale reactions so far?
Susie Essman: I don't read any reviews or anything, but friends are loving it. I'm getting a lot of good texts.
Jeff Schaffer: I watched the show with Larry last night and he was happy. I think “content” is the right word. It was satisfying. Through editing, we've watched this episode in parts billions of times. But there's something about watching it the way everyone else watches. It makes it feel real. And I think people liked it. I'm really happy. I'm also happy that we don't have to hide what we were doing anymore.
SE: No more lies and deception.
Well, to that point, I don't know if you saw, but we actually ran a piece here where I predicted that that's what you guys were up to around week two or three.
JS: That was you?
It was. Sorry.
JS: No, no. It was a good article. I remember reading that and being like, Oh, you're onto it. So wait, then—let me ask you a question. So when Larry was in jail and he's doing the pants tent, when we start to pull back… did you think that was going to be the end?
Yeah, I thought that was it. I'd just re-watched the Seinfeld finale, and I was like, All right, there’s the same camera pull-back… And then the twist actually surprised me.
JS: Great. That was exactly the point. When we realized we were going to do this story, we went back into episodes and started to seed things about the Seinfeld finale, like Ted [Danson] talking to Larry about it and those kind of things. We were leaving breadcrumbs, but I don't think we realized that once we even mentioned the word “trial,” that everybody [would start] to think about it. And at first we were like, "Oh, shoot. We didn't hide our hand well enough." But then we very quickly realized, This is great. Let everyone think it—let everyone think that they're getting pranked in slow motion over the course of nine episodes.
Once again, Larry David ends his popular comedy series in the courtroom, this time with a twist.
So when did you guys decide that this is what you wanted to do? And was it almost an exorcism for Larry in a way, to go back to this divisive thing and take another swing at it?
JS: Ending a show is tricky, and you want to end funny. And so we knew we were doing this water story, so a trial is a possible outcome. Or it doesn't go to trial—Trump's getting out of four of them, somehow. Things can happen. Actually, we were just talking about a story about Larry not wanting to get involved with a kid's lesson. And we're acting out the scene a little bit and Larry says, "I'm 75 years old. I've never learned a lesson in my life." And we're like, "Oh, okay. What if we just own this? Then we can do the trial. How can we do the trial? Because we just say Larry's never learned a lesson and we're going to give you the Seinfeld finale on steroids. You didn't like it? We don't care. Here it is again. We're going to shove it in your face. We're even ending with a pull-out [shot of Larry] in jail—until we don't."
And so that was very freeing, because now we have a structure and it gives us a chance to bring some of these old people back. But also, once we were in on the joke, it's not just about this show. It becomes about Larry a little bit, right?
And I think that was what was really cool. This is really about him and how he views [the world]. Baked into his DNA is, I'm a contrarian. That's why the show is so great. This [finale] got to be about something bigger than the show. It got to be about Larry.
Like a final statement on Larry the character.
JS: Yeah.
Who came up with the idea to not just repeat the Seinfeld ending but then add that twist? Was that always in play, or was that a last minute addition?
JS: Once we started going on this path, we knew we were going to take it right up to that end and then [a] Curb story had to kick in again, right? The bad sequester was going to come back. A Curb story was going to come back around. We knew that we were going to take everybody right to the brink and then have Jerry say, "You don't want to end up like this. Trust me. No one wants to see it." But the idea of Larry and Jerry saying, "This is how we should have ended the finale"—that part came as we were shooting.
SE: That's the joy of working this way—the surprises that come up.
What I really liked about the episode was that you have the trial and you have all the cameos and all the flashy stuff, but at the core it was just like a classic Curb episode with classic Curb bits. Specifically, I feel like we don't get the Larry and Susie team up that often. So when we do, it's a real treat, and your scheme here actually reminded me of “The Ski Lift.”
SE: Yeah, when I had to play his wife. I thought the same thing. Larry always says it's one of his favorite scenes in one of his favorite episodes. Having to play his Orthodox wife was just one of the most fun scenes we ever shot.
JS: I'm glad you noticed that. It was really, really important for us that it wasn't just our cast sitting in a trial, but that we had stories, Curb stories with fun Curb moments for our Curb cast woven through the show. And the stories actually propel the show. Not the flashbacks. Not the trial. That was the thing we worked the hardest at that I'm actually the most satisfied about, is that it's a Curb episode. Not a clip show.
SE: And these two, Larry and Jeff, the brilliance of them of being able to figure those things out—it looks so organic when you see the episode. But there's painstaking work that goes behind it of trying to figure out how to weave all these storylines together and the flashbacks and the finale and the ending and Journey Gunderson, and all of that stuff.
JS: Susie had another big moment in the middle [of the episode]. It was super funny, but the story wasn't quite right and it wasn't happening in the court. And we actually did a re-shoot so that her being in the wheelchair intersected with her [original moment] in court now. It makes the court feel like it's part of the story, not like some separate thing.
Larry David calls him indispensable. Richard Lewis told him he was “a fucking beast” as a comic actor. But as he prepares to say goodbye to the show that made him an out-of-nowhere comedy star in his 40s, Smoove is facing forward: “I'm still fresh…. I can work with anybody, I can do anything.”
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Were there other story beats or character beats that you had always wanted to try that you were maybe trying to get in this episode or this final season that you just didn't have time for?
SE: There was another storyline that we shot of mine that just wasn't gelling. It was more of a storyline to give me something funny. And the idea of it was funny, but it just wasn't moving the story forward, I think. Is that correct, Jeff?
JS: Yeah. And so then we got her big funny moment that moves the story forward because it happened in court. But I was about to say to you, we don't really think like that, like, "Oh, there's this moment that we want to get in, so let's force it in here." Because it really depends on exactly what Susie said: what's moving the story forward?
But to contradict myself twice in this episode alone, Larry had this funny thing about dating the bearded woman once she shaved and he'd wanted to talk about that. It's something that we had talked about as we were writing in many different episodes, and I'm so glad we saved it because it was the perfect thing for Larry and Jerry to talk about, a real coffee shop hypothetical.
And watching these two just talk about an idea and giving you a glimpse of what it must've been like for them to create Seinfeld and what it's like for these two to work together. And then the other thing. The final scene of this show—arguing about who gets to control the plane window—we shot that scene twice. We shot it in season nine, we shot it in season 11, and we cut it both times. It was extra. It was an extra thing. And we knew we wanted a scene at the end on the plane, something they could all be arguing about. We're like, "Oh my God, it finally fits." So there are things that we've hung onto, that we've liked, but if it doesn't fit the pace, it goes.
SE: I think the thing about Curb that people don't realize is how much it's about story and how the outlines are all about moving the story forward. So there's plenty of stuff. Over the years, I'll see brilliant improvs that I did that are cut out because they were funny, but they didn't move the story forward. And that's the key. That's the brilliance of Jeff and Larry I think, really ultimately is their sense of story.
I really loved how, before all the dialogue starts overlapping, Susie gets the last clear line with “Go back to jail, Larry.” Just a perfect end note.
SE: Go back to fucking jail, Larry. [laughs]
Jeff, you mentioned watching with Larry last night. Did you guys have a watch party or was it just private?
JS: Oh, no. It was Larry and his wife and his daughter and my wife and I just watching at Larry's house.
I ask because the featurette that you guys put out this morning, it seemed like Larry had a rare moment of real emotion peeking through when you yell cut on the final scene, so I was wondering if he’s being more sentimental about it than we may think.
JS: You mean him making a face and slinking out like, "I don't want to be here"? It was as unemotional as you might expect from the two of us. Larry's daughter hadn't seen the episode yet. It's so fun to watch with someone who's seeing it for the first time, hearing the laughs and seeing that it worked. He was satisfied and I was satisfied.
SE: He texted me this morning that he felt very satisfied, and that made me happy.