Larry David spills about a “Seinfeld” reunion on “Curb”

By Emily Mitchell

When Seinfeld ended in 1998, it was a gateway for executive producer and cowriter Larry David to venture out onto his own project: the sagacious Curb Your Enthusiasm. The show documents his fictionalized life post-Seinfeld. It’s a loosely scripted half-hour comedy about his awkward social and cultural interactions with his friends and neighbors.curb

The show begins its seventh season September 20 after a two-year hiatus, and promises to be possibly its best with a story arc that centers around a Seinfeld reunion. Despite saying in the past that a Seinfeld reunion would never happen, David had the idea himself to incorporate the reunion on Curb.

“I’ve been asked about a Seinfeld reunion, as has Jerry and the other cast members. I would always say, ‘No, there’s no reunion. There’s not going to be a reunion show. We would never do that. It’s a lame idea.’ And then I thought, ‘But it might be very funny to do that on Curb.’ I started to think of different scenarios and how we could pull this off, and I called Jerry. And Jerry was game. And I said, ‘Well, I’ll call the others,’ and I did. And we did it.”

Audiences are eager to see the Seinfeld cast [Jerry Seinfeld (as himself), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Elaine Benes), Jason Alexander (George Costanza), and, of course, Michael Richards (Cosmo Kramer)] back together. But they shouldn’t expect to see full episodes of Seinfeld being played out on Curb. Instead, David will show viewers more of the behind-the-scenes action that goes into filming an episode of the sitcom.

“You’re not going to see a Seinfeld show from beginning to end, but you will see parts of the show. You will get an idea of what happened 11 years later,” David shares. “We’re going to see writing. We’ll see aspects of the read-through, parts of rehearsals. You’ll see the show being filmed. And you’ll see it on TV. The cast members will be playing themselves on Curb while all this is going on.”

The Seinfeld cast will not be appearing in every episode of the season. “The reunion is scattered through the season, and I think the cast will be on five shows.”

Getting the Seinfeld cast back together was the only thing David found easy — he struggled a bit with the plot about what the Seinfeld cast had been up to all those years off the air.

“Coming up with the right ideas for what’s happened in 11 years, that took some thought.”

But Curb doesn’t require much of a script — in fact, it has been mostly improv since the show began, unlike Seinfeld, which was completely scripted.

“I show up at work and I don’t even know what I’m doing that day. Two minutes before we are supposed to do a scene I will say, ‘Let me see what the scene is.’ And I will read the scene. And that’s what I have been doing the whole time. Literally I really [do] not even know what I’m shooting.”

Aside from Curb, David is an avid New York Yankees fan and father. When asked if he misses George Steinbrenner, he emphatically blurts, “No, not at all, uh-uh. No. I don’t miss him. I wish him all the best, but no.”

And when it comes to what he’s watching on the tube, his two teenage daughters have him watching Gossip Girl.

“I think it is very interesting. Many of the characters seem to sound like this. They are all kind of breathy. Very, very sophisticated.”

His New York roots have overlapped from Seinfeld onto Curb and in his real life.

“I would walk down the street [in L.A.], scowling because something was bothering me, and this happened a number of times where people would say, ‘Smile!’ But it’s a crazy thing to say to somebody. Mind your own business! What if I yelled out, ‘I just found out I have cancer, OK? So shut your @#$%-in’ mouth.’

The long-awaited seventh season of Curb will be one of the best yet, uniting his old project Seinfeld with his current one. Although he plays a different version of Larry David on Curb, both share one thing in common: dry, sharp humor.

“I’m getting a little like Curb Larry. We’re melding a bit. I am a little bit happier.”

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Courtesy of HBO