One of television’s most acclaimed reunions took place in 2009 when the HBO comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm reunited the cast of the NBC sitcom Seinfeld. Though it didn’t happen the way fans expected, it was the only way we could see Jerry, Kramer, Elaine, and George on screen together again. The cast agreed to appear on the show after a request from Larry David, co-creator of Seinfeld and the mastermind behind Curb Your Enthusiasm. But as important as the event was, David has admitted that the reunion happened because he’d run out of ideas for the season.
David, also a writer on both shows, revisited the reunion for the companion book No Lessons Learned: The Making of Curb Your Enthusiasm as Told by Larry David and the Cast and Crew. Jeff Schaffer, the director of many Curb episodes, was also featured in the book. They each offered comments about the long-awaited reunion, and how it exactly took place.
“We’re always looking for a great story arc, and they’re not that easy to come up with,” David recalled. “They’re more in the vein of a movie premise.” In the episode titled “Seinfeld,” Larry is tasked with writing a fictional reunion that will bring back the classic cast. However, he’s just in it to win back his ex-wife Cheryl. It was a hilarious storyline that he came up with when they ran out of ideas for another episode: “That’s how the Seinfeld reunion came about. We knew it was something we could have fun with… and we had no other ideas at the time.”
Schaffer, on the other hand, expanded on the basics of the reunion and going against the expectations of the audience. The director is also credited with writing several Seinfeld episodes, and when they made the decision to officially gather the team, he decided to “deprive people of exactly what they wanted.” He says they intentionally went for something unconventional:
“We knew we weren’t going to do the Seinfeld reunion that NBC wanted. [We wouldn’t do] corny. We were going to do a Curb-style Seinfeld reunion, which meant Curb Larry was going to get the cast back together and do a reunion for his own selfish reasons. He wanted to get back with Cheryl. His whole agenda was self-serving.
“All those things that people wanted in a Seinfeld reunion, like, ‘Oh, I can’t wait for Jerry and Elaine to get together, and the show is going to end with a wedding!’ We gave it to them, but off-camera, because the two split up before the reunion.”
There Was Just One Way to Carry Out a ‘Seinfeld’ Reunion, and It Was on the Very Show That Replaced It
Curb Your Enthusiasm is essentially the show that replaced Seinfeld in terms of its impact on popular culture. Yes, it was mostly improvised, and didn’t follow the traditional sitcom structure. But when it comes to the type of humor that made Seinfeld so singular in the ’90s TV landscape, Curb Your Enthusiasm is the perfect successor. Jerry Seinfeld himself admits in the book that reuniting outside the NBC setting was the right way to do it:
“I did think it was a good idea because I knew that doing a conventional network-type reunion show was never going to be appropriate for us. So being on Larry’s show was a perfect way to do it.”
- Release Date
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2000 – 2024-00-00
- Network
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HBO Max
- Directors
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Robert B. Weide, Larry Charles, David Steinberg, Bryan Gordon, Alec Berg, Andy Ackerman, David Mandel, Barry Gordon, Cheryl Hines, Dean Parisot