A quick review of tonight’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm” coming up just as soon as I direct a “Silver Spoons” on 48 hours notice…
“Here’s an idea: why don’t you mind your own business?” -the pig parker
“Well, I suppose that’s an idea. Not a very good one, though.” -Larry
“The Vow of Silence” has as its main goal getting Larry to move to New York for whatever’s going to happen with the rest of the season. And yet on the way to that goal, it’s a pretty classically-structured episode of “Curb,” one with that elegant design where all the plot threads(*) come together at the end, and where there’s an equal mix of Larry being obnoxious but right (the parking issue(**), calling out the woman for her chat-n-cut) and Larry just being a bit of a jerk (he and Jeff engaging in a spiteful eating of the Pinkberry, depriving Oscar of his last meal, Larry being pushy with the vet). I loved how the growing awareness of the chat-n-cut wound up biting Larry in the ass and putting him into the path of Tessler(***), which in turn dug him in deep enough that he had no choice but to commit to the New York lie. I like that this is the reason Larry would move cross-country: he’s just that stubborn that he’ll spend months living in Renny Harlin’s apartment just to get out of spending an afternoon with those kids, or letting Tessler act morally superior to him. That’s our Larry.
(*) Well, almost all. Larry’s inappropriate conversations with the vet and his wife never really amounted to much, but no biggie.
(**) Though I think Larry is in the wrong for parking out of sequence. The proper etiquette when someone is a pig parker is to park in a regular space if you can, so that when the pig leaves, you’re not accidentally the pig yourself.
(**) Michael McKean, as usual, fits perfectly into this kind of improvised comedy, and we also had another Christopher Guest veteran in Michael Hitchcock as the silent Vance, plus Cedric Yarbrough from “Reno 911” as one of the Pinkberry customers, and Rich Sommer (best known as Harry Crane on “Mad Men,” but he’s worked with Upright Citizens Brigade) as the vet.
The episode was so well put-together, in fact, that we had a perfect double-header at the end. Had we stopped with the shot of Larry on the plane next to a furious Susie, it still would have been fantastic. But adding Lewis fuming at the restaurant on top of that? Boom-boom-boom.
What did everybody else think?