Curb Your Enthusiasm's Season 11 Finale Was Originally Much Bleaker
The dark, painfully cringe improv comedy "Curb Your Enthusiasm" has been around since the year 2000. Fans have stayed loyal to the HBO darling in spite of lengthy production times and long stretches between seasons. It's one of the most successful and beloved sitcoms on television today, given how it still averages an 8.8/10 on IMDb and a whopping 92% approval rating from audiences and critics alike on Rotten Tomatoes.
In Season 11 of the series, Larry's (Larry David) life gets thrown through a loop (yes, again!) when a burglar drowns in his pool after trying to rob his house. You'd think it would be an open-and-shut case, but the local authorities step in and penalize Larry for not having a protective five-foot fence around his pool to prevent such accidental deaths. Naturally, the show's protagonist deals with this predicament exactly the way fans would expect: he goes to great lengths to get the pool fence ordinance repealed so that he doesn't have to suffer any consequences for the deceased burglar's clumsiness and poor life choices.
In the season finale, Larry sneaks into the house of one of his political rivals in order to steal some incriminating documents and ends up tripping and falling into their pool while making a hasty escape. The last time fans see Larry, he's shouting "Where's the fence?!" as he struggles to swim to the surface. Since we now know that "Curb Your Enthusiasm" Season 12 is coming (eventually), it's safe to say that Larry will survive his ordeal. But it wasn't always written that way.
Larry was supposed to suffer a hilariously ironic death
According to a recent interview with The Hollywood Reporter, showrunners Jeff Schaffer and Larry David originally wrote Season 11 as if it would be the show's last. To that end, they originally planned for Larry to drown after falling in his neighbor's pool, bringing the season's narrative full circle and — ironically — causing him to die as a result of trying to repeal a safety measure that could have saved his life. According to Schaffer, they even shot a scene depicting Larry's accidental death, doing so in anticipation of a potential cancellation.
"This season when we started with Larry finding the dead guy in the pool, right away I knew that we were going to end it with Larry falling into a pool because there was no fence," Schaffer explained to The Hollywood Reporter. "Larry kept falling into that pool without the fence and banging his head [for the scene]...We just got high and wide on the pool, with one light shining on it and...we said, 'OK, if this is how we go, this is how we go!'"
Luckily for fans, Schaffer and David are already back at it and preparing for Season 12. But as of right now, Schaffer has confirmed that the next season is incomplete and that they still have a lot of work to do before fans will get to curb their enthusiasm again.