Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 5
The cover art for HBO's comedyCurb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Fifth Seasonimplies that the series' star Larry David is Everyman. Larry is not Everyman; in fact, he is far from it. Somewhat of an amalgam of the Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer characters he co-created forSeinfeld, yet so uniquely Larry, his socially inept behavior is the basis for and the best part of the show. This fifth season holds no exceptions to the world oblivious to social graces that is Larry David's. Larry tackles some tough issues, his main conundrum being the fact that his close friend Richard Lewis (comedian Richard Lewis playing himself) needs a new kidney. Season 5 slants towards Larry's soul searching: will he take the donor test? Is he a match? What will he do if he is a match? We see how far Larry will go to help his friend in need: staging car accidents, fake marriages, and more. We think we see some depth to Larry when he suspects he may be adopted and cheerfully embarks on a search to find his "real" parents, but are reminded how things really are, when he throws morality out the window, striking up a friendship with the known sexual predator in the neighborhood in order to improve his golf game. Of course there is the verySeinfeldfeel to this show in general, the tone, the self-involved lead character--and in the first few episodes there are actual storylines and even spoken lines taken almost verbatim fromSeinfeldepisodes, so much so that an avidSeinfeldfan may start to lose patience.  Stick with it, though, because theSeinfeld-ian similarities wind down through the second half of the season and theCurb your Enthusiasmhilarity revs up.--Rachel Moss