Curb Your Enthusiasm

Set in Los Angeles and loosely based on David's life as a semi-retired multimillionaire in the world after Seinfeld, the series is often described as a more subversive take on that hit program's "little show about nothing" motif.

The latitude afforded by cable television allows David to employ a darker comic palette while exploring many of his stock themes: the banal idiosyncrasies of daily life, the quirky entanglements of personal relations, the over-the-top social snafus. Curb weaves wry, ironic stories around the minutiae of David's sensitivities, his propensity for outrage, and misanthropic flouting of conventions -- which turn out to reveal an unwitting knack for self-destructive behavior.

Shot on location with hand-held cameras, Curb Your Enthusiasm is produced unconventionally, eschewing traditional scripts in favor of detailed scene outlines from which actors improvise dialogue. Curb develops ongoing story lines and in-jokes set around David's interaction with his patient but put-upon wife, his loyal manager and others in the upper echelons of Hollywood.

Though many scenarios are drawn from his own experiences, the real-life David has downplayed the notion that he is like the character portrayed onscreen. In a Bob Costas interview, he did, however, say the Larry David of the show was the one he often wants to be in real life -- but can't, due to his sensitivity to others and to social conventions. For example, he forbids characters in CYE to use insults that may personally offend the actors (for example calling Jeff Greene fat) unless the actor (in this case, Jeff Garlin) okays it.