Book Review – Curb Your Enthusiasm
A Decent Retrospective of the Popular HBO Original Series.
Larry David’s popular HBO original series Curb Your Enthusiasm had amassed a devoted following as of the publication of Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Book (Gotham, ISBN: 1592402305, 2006). While the cutting edge nature of the show allows improvisation to take the lead in forming humorous situations, the guide to the show would have greatly benefitted from a more obsessive level of planning and control.
The Book Could Go Much Further in Depth
Despite the book only covering the first five seasons of the show, it could go much further in depth. The Seinfeld retrospective magazine that TV Guide put out about ten years ago was similar, but felt much more complete.
Perhaps it’s just the fact that Curb Your Enthusiasm is such a unique show: just as plotted, but not nearly as esoteric with its links. There seems to be fewer “stand alone” style episodes that Seinfeld and other network shows do. Another explanation could be the mere ten episodes per season leaves only fifty episodes for the book to cover. Regardless, the book only gives a bare minimum of information: episode names, plots, characters, and near-pointless trivia.
The Nature of Curb Your Enthusiasm
Curb Your Enthusiasm’s seasonal arc is much sharper than that of a normal sit-com, and therefore almost necessitates links from episode to episode. This, along with the improvisation, leads to a lack of trivia. Along with the episode summaries in the book, there are bits of “script” and the aforementioned little pieces of trivia: a producer played a doorman in some episode, and some star turned down and offer to be in some other episode.
It’s all interesting enough, but there’s nothing, and certainly not enough of anything, to make this book worth paying full price for. There’s a surplus of pictures, something that Curb Your Enthusiasm lends itself well to, with Larry’s facial expressions and the amount of bizarre props that are used on the show. This is one of the few individual perks of the book, and the large, glossy pages deliver it nicely.
Pretty, Pretty, Pretty, Pretty All Right
If a reader were to open the book looking for candid interviews and exclusive this-or-that, they would be sorely disappointed when they didn’t find it. It’s almost as if the show is just too much fun to watch (and make, by the looks of things) for it to do anything seriously. As a coffee table book, it does what it should: look nice, have lots of pictures, and be light on text. As Larry might say, the book is "Pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty all right."
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Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Book
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