‘Curb’s Finale Did the Impossible: It Redeemed ‘Seinfeld’s Finale

The following post contains spoilers for the Curb Your Enthusiasm finale. What’s the deal with the word spoilers? Nothing here is spoiled! It’s not like the piece is going to give you food poisoning if you read it without watching the episode!

The Curb Your Enthusiasm finale may not have been perfect, but it had the perfect title: “No Lessons Learned.”

From Curb’s season premiere earlier this year, it looked likely that its creator and star Larry David planned to — almost literally! — re-litigate the finale of Seinfeld, one of the most notorious television episodes in the history of the medium.

David, who co-created Seinfeld with Jerry Seinfeld, had left that show after its seventh season. When Jerry decided to conclude his eponymous sitcom at the end of its ninth season, David returned to co-write the super-sized finale, which saw Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer go on trial for breaking a small-town’s outrageous “Good Samaritan Law.”

The trial was largely a pretext for Seinfeld to look back at its own history, with many guest stars returning to take the stand and testify against Seinfeld’s stars. One by one, fan favorites appeared to recount the many injustices that had been committed against them through the years. In the end, Jerry and his pals were found guilty and sentenced to one year in prison.

That was how Seinfeld went off the air, with Jerry and company sharing a tiny jail cell while Jerry and George resumed a debate about dress shirt buttons from Seinfeld’s pilot. It was a pointed callback, one that subtly explained why Seinfeld was ending at the height of its popularity: Its creators wanted to quit before they started repeating themselves.

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The Seinfeld finale drew enormous ratings but received mixed to bad reviews from fans who found it contrived, overcrowded, and not especially funny — and certainly not worthy of a show as great as Seinfeld. As the years have gone on, it’s become a fixture on lists of the worst TV finales in history, along with Game of Thrones, Dexter, and How I Met Your Mother. I just Googled “worst TV finales” and I could not find a single article from a reputable outlet that did not include Seinfeld.

Obviously, Larry David does not see it that way — and he was ready to risk tanking the finale of another beloved sitcom to prove it. And so Curb Your Enthusiasm’s final season built all year to another big courtroom showdown connected to another ridiculous law, this one making it illegal to hand people water if they are waiting on line to vote in an election. Larry got busted in the season premiere and in the series finale he went on trial.

Not only was the premise the same as Seinfeld’s; the structure was too, with Curb Your Enthusiasm bringing back many of its most popular guest stars so the show could relive some of the fictional Larry David’s worst (or really best) moments one last time. (The highlight of all these returning actors was surely the woman no one recognized — because she had last appeared on the show 23 years earlier as a child in Season 2’s “The Doll,” where Larry had given her an innocent hug while he had a water bottle down the front of his pants, which she mistook for an erection.)

The finale even featured an extended guest appearance by Jerry Seinfeld himself — who has only appeared sporadically on Curb Your Enthusiasm through the years — so the two longtime comedy partners could dissect some more pointless minutiae, possibly for the very last time onscreen.

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It’s funny how such a shameless rehash could feel bold — but that’s exactly the word I would use to describe the Curb Your Enthusiasm finale. Like his fictional counterpart, Larry David has a hard time letting perceived slights go, and the reaction to the Seinfeld finale has obviously stuck in his craw for 25 years. Given the opportunity to go out on his own terms, there was only one way he was going to do it: With total spite for his audience.

Hence, “No Lessons Learned,” an episode that proved its hero’s core philosophy not only by showing how onscreen Larry refused to grow as a human being, but also by having offscreen Larry David shove the ending his fans hated down their throats for a second time.

(Larry David has truly been committed to not learning for a lifetime. The phrase “No Lessons Learned” is very close to the mantra he supposedly instilled in the entire Seinfeld creative team back in the day: “No Hugging, No Learning.” Or, as fictional Larry reiterated to a small child in the Curb Your Enthusiasm finale: “I’m 76 years old and I have never learned a lesson in my entire life!”)

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If you were paying attention though, you might have spotted a couple very small indications that maybe — just maybe — Larry has learned a thing or two. For one thing, the Curb Your Enthusiasm finale contained a much looser and more relaxed pace than the Seinfeld finale. Yes, it had a lot of plot surrounding Larry’s trial and the returning guest stars. But it also left room for moments between Larry and his supporting cast — Jeff Garlin, Cheryl Hines, Susie Essman, J.B. Smoove, and the late, great Richard Lewis — to riff on trivial stupidity in the manner that had made people love Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm for decades.

Plus, while David copied the Seinfeld finale’s plot beat-for-beat — even finding the fictional Larry guilty, sending him to prison, and having him repeat a dialogue exchange from Curb Your Enthusiasm’s first episode (in his case about a “pants tent”) — he didn’t fully end the show there. At the 11th hour, Jerry appeared one more time to free Larry from his cell. It turned out, Jerry had caught one of Larry’s jurors breaking his sequester. That meant the guilty verdict got thrown out. Larry could go home.

“Oh my god,” Larry groans. “this is how we should have ended the finale!”

“Oh my god you’re right!” Jerry replies. “How did we not think of that?”

With that, the two old pals shrugged and walked out of the jail together. At last, they have learned something.

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Or maybe not. Curb Your Enthusiasm’s finale releases Larry from prison for one last scene with the rest of the cast. On a plane home to Los Angeles, Suse raises her window shade so she can read a magazine, blinding Larry and sparking a massive shouting match between everyone in the row. The show fades to black with all of the actors yelling at each other.

While Seinfeld’s “The Finale” still isn’t a great final episode of television, its existence has now led to the creation of one of the great final episodes of television — one that concluded with that incredibly poetic last shot. Larry might have won, but he’s right back in the same place. For a man as disagreeable as Curb’s Larry David, solitary confinement might have been the only place where he would have truly felt free.