If you or I were asked to place odds on Curb Your Enthusiasm returning, 50-50 would be a decent place to start, if only because everything is 50-50 in a way. It either happens or it doesn’t. The verbal equivalent of a shrug emoji, if you will. HBO President Michael Lombardo chimed in on the matter last week, saying that he ran into Larry David recently, and Larry “pointed to a notebook” that he indicated was the early stages of the next season, but that really doesn’t get us any closer to an answer because, for all we know, the only thing in the notebook is a single phrase like “Tinder mishap.” (“That wasn’t a swipe! I was just cleaning the screen! There was a smudge! A SMUDGE!”)
No, we must go to the source. Or, at least, closer to the source. Which we did at the TCA panel for The Goldbergs this week, where David’s Curb co-star Jeff Garlin put the odds of a new season at… 51 percent. An improvement!
“It’s the only show in all of television that only moves forward because the creator is only basing his decision on creativity,” Garlin said. “Larry David is so goddamn rich that he doesn’t have to do anything unless it’s good! He doesn’t want to embarrass himself. So it’s pretty pure. I don’t know how many shows disregard that completely.”
The show hasn’t aired since 2011, and, as Garlin says, its creator is incredibly rich and under no pressure from HBO to do a new season, so OK, 51 percent is a number we can live with. But if you see Larry David in some Los Angeles coffee shop scribbling in a notebook, feel free to get a little excited.
