Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Season 11 On HBO, Where Larry David Gets Blackmailed, Debates ‘Plopping’ And Dates Lucy Liu

If it seems like no time has passed between seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm, it’s because season 10 finished airing in March 2020. Nineteen months between Curb seasons is nothing — Larry David took six years between seasons 8 and 9 — but there’s also been an entire pandemic since then. So, in the first season since all of (waves hand) this started, how will Larry address the pandemic? Will he even acknowledge it? Read on for more.

CURB YOUR ENTHUSIASM SEASON 11: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: It’s 3:12 in the morning. Larry David (himself) is woken up by a strange noise. He investigates, sees the back door open, goes out to his backyard and screams when he sees a body in his pool.

The Gist: Apparently someone broke into Larry’s house, and in his haste to leave, the burglar tripped, hit his head, fell in the pool and drowned. But that’s not the worst news as Larry and Leon (JB Smoove) talk to the Santa Monica cop at the scene; it seems that he’s violating a town ordinance saying he needs a fence, at least five feet tall, around the pool at all times. “This is the way it came!” Larry protests.

Undeterred, Larry and Jeff (Jeff Garlin) go to Netflix HQ to pitch a new series. It’s Young Larry, about him when he lived in Brooklyn in his 20s. He lived with his thrifty uncle, who told him he’d give him his 7-figure inheritance. So young Larry tries his best to hasten his grumpy uncle’s demise. The executive, Don Winston, Jr. (Reed Hastings), buys the idea on the spot. Larry and Jeff are wondering how being a “Don Jr.” sucks these days after four years of our previous president.

There are other things going on that Larry finds ridiculous. For one, Albert Brooks is holding a funeral for himself while he’s still alive; Albert and his girlfriend Jodi (Laura Kightlinger) will watch the proceedings from an upstairs bedroom. His friend Dennis Zweibel (John Pirruccello), supposedly suffering from early-onset dementia, still owes Larry $6,000 from when Larry fronted him money for a fishing trip; Larry confronts him when he sees Dennis at the supermarket. Dennis calls him a “bad guy” and Larry responds, “I’m a good guy!”

Larry is dating Lucy Liu, somehow, and she goes with him to the house of Leon’s new girlfriend Mary. While there, Susie (Susie Essman) plops down on the couch while chewing out Larry about Dennis and he spills red wine on the white couch; he tries to get Albert and Jeff to say that Susie is a “plopper”. Then, as they go to the patio, Larry runs into the glass patio door, causing Lucy to see him in a new, more feeble light.

In the meantime, the brother of the guy who drowned in Larry’s pool blackmails Larry over the fence issue; he wants his daughter, Maria Sofia (Keyla Monterroso Mejia), to land a part in Larry’s Netflix show. Larry, facing what he thinks is a long court battle and possible jail time (?), concedes that Maria Sofia is going to get the part, despite being wrong for it and a terrible actress.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Curb Seasons 1-10, of course. It’s not like the show changes all that much.

Our Take: While the new season of Curb addresses the pandemic in its very Curb-like way — Larry bemoans all the COVID hoarders from the beginning of the pandemic, then he wanders into a closet at Albert Brooks’ funeral and finds that his friend is one of them — it feels like the show’s first pandemic season takes place in a more post-COVID world. Which is fine. While there are things about the pandemic that we’re sure pisses Larry off, having it dominate the story probably was something he and showrunner Jeff Schaffer never intended to do.

The first Season 11 episode felt like classic Curb, with Larry railing against a series of small annoyances and societal niceties. But with the Young Larry storyline, we see what David, Schaffer and company have in mind as the overall arc of the season. We get the feeling he’s going to be yelling about being a good guy a lot this season, as Maria Sofia basically ruins this new show and his relationship with Netflix (which we bet HBO loves to see).

But as we go along, it’ll be funny to see all of the familiar Curb situations and guest stars. We see Jon Hamm pop up at Albert Brooks’ funeral, quizzing Larry on the right Yiddish term to use during his eulogy. There’s Brooks himself, who isn’t playing a Funkhouser like his late brother Bob Einstein did, but we’re happy to see him playing himself. We also hope to see more of Lucy Liu, even though it feels kind of impossible that she and Larry would be dating at all.

Did we need to see something revolutionary in episode 1, a latter-day classic like “Palestinian Chicken”? Nah. We don’t expect every episode of Curb at this point to be a home run. But there’s comfort in the laughs we do get from the multiple smaller stories that we get from an episode like this. We’re definitely curious to see how the blackmail plot plays out, though.

Sex and Skin: None, but we felt for Larry when Lucy saw him as enfeebled after he banged into that door.

Parting Shot: Larry and Albert, both dateless, go to see Luciano Michelini in concert. The first song his orchestra plays? “Frolic,” the theme to Curb Your Enthusiasm (Michelini wrote the song in the ’70s).

Sleeper Star: JB Smoove, always and forever. After Leon sees Mary Ferguson hit a glass door at Brooks’ funeral, he auditions other Mary Fergusons, because he has an expensive vacation ticket to Asia and can’t change the name on the ticket.

Most Pilot-y Line: Larry and Dennis get into it at the country club, where Dennis thinks he already wrote Larry the check for the money he owed. In there, they argue that Larry complimented Dennis’ shirt. Dennis says Larry’s never complimented anyone. So when two other club members intervene, Larry asks them if he’s ever complimented them. It’s just one of those tiny Curb gags that could be a whole b-story, but feels thrown in here.

Our Call: STREAM IT. While the last few seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm can’t match the consistency of its earlier ones, there are always funny moments when Larry complains about something and/or he gets his comeuppance for his grouchiness. In the first episode of Season 11, there’s both, plus a promising new season-long arc. That’s more than enough for us.

Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.

Stream Curb Your Enthusiasm On HBO Max