Every Curb Your Enthusiasm Season Ranked Worst To Best

Even a show as great as "Curb" has to have a bum note or two, and sadly Season 9 fits that bill. Premiering in 2017 after a six-year hiatus, there's a definite sense of shaking off the cobwebs and adjusting to a new era. That feeling of catching up with things permeates the season's two main serialized plots: Larry's doomed musical about Salman Rushdie and the wedding of Jeff and Susie's daughter Sammi (Ashly Holloway). The musical, based on the fatwa issued against Rushdie by Ayatollah Khomeini in the 1980s, results in Larry himself getting fatwa'd by a group of Muslim clerics; the only way they will call off the fatwa is if Larry gets "Hamilton" star Lin-Manuel Miranda to star in the musical. Miranda plays himself, and it's no surprise that the enthusiastic theatre kid turns out to be a controlling egomaniac.

Sammi, meanwhile, was an angry teenager when last seen in Season 8; now she is a young woman with an Army veteran fiancé. Larry, of course, causes a stir when he fails to thank the young man for his service. The two plots converge in typical "Curb" fashion at Sammi's wedding, but without the madcap spark of the best seasons.

Many television shows, especially comedy shows, take some time to find their voice, which can make revisiting the early episodes a little jarring. The first season of "Parks and Recreation," for instance, is a much different show than what came after. "Curb," however, arrived pretty much fully formed. Part of that is due to the show having a structure not terribly different from what David had honed to perfection on "Seinfeld," in which a foible, faux pas, little white lie, or missed social cue spirals into chaos. Later seasons of "Curb" would hit those "Seinfeld"-ian heights, but the raw materials are very much there in Season 1, from Richard Lewis (playing himself) and his revolving-door dating life, to Larry and Cheryl's frenemy couple Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, to Cheryl's credulity-straining tolerance for Larry's shenanigans.

Those shenanigans benefitted from HBO's anything-goes take on content and language, giving David a freedom to express himself that would have been unthinkable in the days of "master of your domain." And while dirtier doesn't always mean funnier, on "Curb" it very much does, whether that's a barrage of profane insults from Susie or the worst typo imaginable in Cheryl's aunt's obituary.

Season 4 of "Curb" is remembered for two things: For being the "Producers" season, and for saving a man's life. After seeing Larry performing karaoke at a bar one night, legendary comedian Mel Brooks offers Larry the lead role in the upcoming revival of Brooks' hit musical "The Producers," opposite Ben Stiller. When working with Larry proves too much for Ben to handle, he leaves the production and is replaced by David Schwimmer from "Friends." Larry frets over his inability to remember his lines, and sure enough, he blanks during his first scene on opening night. What happens next is one of "Curb's" best endings, with twists on top of twists as Larry's standup experience saves him from humiliation, and Mel Brooks' true intentions in casting him are revealed. 

In the season's sixth episode, "The Car Pool Lane," Larry hires a sex worker (Kym Whitley) to sit with him in the car so that he can take advantage of the car pool lane while running errands. One of those errands is to catch a baseball game at Dodgers Stadium; the raw footage of the crowd at that particular game included a man named Juan Catalan, who months later would be arrested for a murder he did not commit. He might have been convicted and sentenced to death if not for that raw footage confirming his alibi. The wild true story was presented by the 2019 Netflix documentary "Long Shot."

It took "Curb" six seasons to realize it needed a Kramer. While there was never a one-to-one corollary between "Curb" and "Seinfeld" characters, Larry clearly carried on the spirit of George Costanza, while his relationships with Richard Lewis and Jeff recalled George and Jerry's friendship, and Susie embodied Elaine's withering disdain. But for its first five seasons, "Curb" didn't really have a Kramer surrogate, someone floating through life without any skills or prospects other than their own charisma, asking little in return but to endlessly mooch food, and constituting an aspirational and a cautionary tale in equal measure. 

Then came the Blacks, a Black family displaced by Hurricane Edna whom Larry and Cheryl essentially adopt and invite to live with them while their house in Louisiana is being repaired. Led by matriarch Loretta and her brother Leon, the Blacks make themselves at home in the David house just as it is finally splitting apart: Cheryl leaves Larry for good. This season marks the end of one "Curb" era and the beginning of another, as Larry's adventures as a single man of a certain age take center stage moving forward. While he loses one partner in crime in Cheryl, he gains a new, arguably better one in Leon, who chooses to stay behind while the rest of the Blacks return home at the end of the season, settling into Larry's pool house and imparting simultaneously sage and terrible advice to Larry for years to come. He's the best Kramer anyone could have asked for.

Larry meets his maker in more ways than one in Season 5, a surprisingly weighty consideration of mortality, legacy, and spirituality. It is unclear whether this season was ever intended to be the show's last, but it plays in many ways like a sendoff, complete with a series-spanning montage of Larry's worst offenses in the season finale, followed by a literal trip to the afterlife featuring guest star angels Dustin Hoffman and Sacha Baron Cohen. The questions of what Larry will leave behind and how he will be remembered permeate the season, whether it's a whitefish sandwich named in his honor at a local deli or donating a kidney to his dying friend Richard Lewis.

Spiritual matters occupy nearly every episode, from Larry inviting a registered sex offender (Rob Corddry) to his Passover seder, to he and Susie pretending to be an Orthodox husband and wife in order to get in good with the doctor in charge of Richard's kidney operation. Larry has never been particularly religious, but his relationship to Judaism is thrown into stark relief when his father Nat (comedy legend Shelley Berman), recovering from a stroke, reveals that Larry was adopted, and Larry discovers that his birth parents may be a Gentile couple living in Arizona. 

The season begins and ends with a brush with death that prompts Larry to declare himself a changed man, but that change only lasts as long as the first petty irritant he comes across. We wouldn't have it any other way.

In Season 3 Larry puts his money where his mouth is, so to speak, becoming an investor in a trendy new restaurant along with Jeff and Ted Danson, Larry's perpetual (albeit mostly one-sided) rival. The two butt heads on every decision about the restaurant, which incurs numerous delays thanks to damage caused by a corpse-sniffing dog named Oscar and Larry's firing of their bald head chef (Ian Gomez) after discovering that he wears a toupée in his off hours. Fed up, Ted withdraws his investment, but he'll be back to torment Larry soon enough.

Season 3 was the show's first attempt at heavy serialization; only a few episodes are unrelated to the restaurant story, most notably a spat between Cheryl and Susie bubbling under the surface. Things come to a head in perhaps the most triumphant finale in "Curb" history. The day before the restaurant is set to open, Larry hires a fancy French chef (Paul Sand) who happens to have Tourette's Syndrome, involuntarily and frequently shouting obscenities. As the season's characters all gather to celebrate opening night, everything goes swimmingly until the chef lets loose a barrage of swears from the open-air kitchen. The dining room freezes. Larry, seizing the moment, screams his own line of vulgarities. Then Jeff. Then Cheryl (right as Susie is coming in). Soon the entire restaurant is laughing and swearing at each other, and Larry proudly stands in the middle of it all as the familiar strains of Luciano Michelini's "Frolic" play. It's the perfect ending to the show's best season.