The world has changed a lot in the 24 years since Curb Your Enthusiasm first shrugged onto television. Watch Larry David’s partly improvised meta-sitcom from the beginning and you’ll witness post-9/11 jitters; the brief rise of BlackBerry; Netflix joining Curb’s home base of HBO in the prestige TV space; and guest stars like Elizabeth Banks, Jon Hamm, and Laverne Cox becoming famous enough to play themselves on the show. What hasn’t changed in all this time, though, is David’s unwillingness to participate in life’s more tedious rituals—like having to sing “Happy Birthday” as an adult—which are table stakes for being welcome in polite society.
David’s pathological aversion to ever going along to get along created iconic TV for connoisseurs of cringe. It might also have made some viewers question whether the unwritten rules of social etiquette, such as waiting until the server brings everyone’s meals before digging in, really are worth following. Through unearthing so many thorny ambiguities over the years, one thing David’s behavior should make unquestionably clear is that working for, or with, him—the character, not necessarily the person—would be a total nightmare.
Across Curb’s 12 seasons, the ebullient Scrooge at its center creates several TV shows, dabbles in the restaurant business, stars in a Broadway musical, and masterminds one of his own. Through some magical combination of stubbornness and chutzpah, he ends up bringing all his social peccadillos to all these workplaces. While his creative contributions to each project betray flashes of the innovative thinker who cocreated Seinfeld, David’s managerial style and approach to collaboration make it seem like a miracle Seinfeld ever lasted nine seasons.
On April 7, Curb will make its final awkward goodbyes, saddled with the heavy burden of potentially improving upon the little-loved Seinfeld finale. (Not that David seems like he cares much about whatever audiences want from a finale.) Here are five times the series served as a masterclass in how not to be a leader, just a smattering of the standouts amid countless examples.
Don’t embark on a new venture just for petty, selfish reasons
It was bad enough, in the show’s seventh season, when David agreed to write a Seinfeld reunion just so he could possibly win back his ex-wife Cheryl (Cheryl Hines) by casting her in a key role. (A gambit that was technically successful, if also the source of much interpersonal strife.) But that whim-based business decision is nothing compared to David’s “spite store” in Season 10.
Mocha Joe’s, a mirror version of celebrity barista Jeremy Gursey’s Mocha Kiss Coffee, is the hottest spot for coffee in the world of the show. But when the coffee isn’t hot enough for David, and the tables inside prove too wobbly, he complains. A lot. He complains so much, in fact, that Mocha Joe himself (Saverio Guerra) bans him from the shop. Rather than beg for forgiveness or find a suitable alternative, David uses his considerable wealth to lease the open space next door and build a competing coffee house called Latte Larry’s.
Against all odds, the place is a hit. A Today show segment reveals that it even inspired a whole wave of celebrity spite shops, such as Jonah (Hill)’s Deli and Sean (Penn)’s Exotic Birds. Because David has no idea what he’s doing, of course, Latte Larry’s inevitably goes up in flames—literally—and takes Mocha Joe’s with it. (“You did so many stupid things, it looks like arson,” a firefighter notes of the shop’s self-heating cups and tables bolted to the floor.) Any going concern created for such silly reasons is likely doomed to suffer a similar fate.
Don’t be inflexible with your business partners
In what turned out to be a mere warm-up for the full-scale Seinfeld reunion to come, David teams up with Jason Alexander in Season 2, in a getting-the-band-back-together kind of way. The former colleagues plan to create a show about Alexander’s difficulty shedding the George Costanza character from his public perception. It’s an idea rife with creative potential, and it sounds like a moneymaker. Unfortunately, nothing ever comes of it.
Larry resents having suffered a flat tire on the long drive to Alexander’s office, only to find Alexander unwilling to meet on his side of town the next day. It’s a conflict that should take two seconds to resolve, but that does not happen. Alexander holds firm that the aborted first meeting was supposed to take place at his office; thus, it should still happen there. Implied is the idea that subsequent meetings will be divided between their respective areas. It’s not perfect logic; Alexander should perhaps be more sympathetic to David’s difficult tire incident, or at least agree to meet at a neutral third location closer to David’s office. However, David’s pigheadedness is no solution either. Sometimes, it’s better to be mildly inconvenienced than to let a golden opportunity go to waste over a failure to “agree on the locus equidistant of points.”
Don’t flaunt your elevated status in front of your team
Due to a series of ridiculous complications—there is no other kind on this show—David is blackmailed in Season 11 into casting a wildly untalented actress (played by Keyla Monterroso Mejia) in his new show, Young Larry. That actress’s father (Marques Ray) takes advantage of the hold he has over David, making himself right at home on set and sitting in the creator’s chair. Now, much like with Jason Alexander’s reluctance to meet halfway, David has a legitimate grievance here. How he handles it, though, could hardly be worse.
David asks the prop manager (Glenn Keogh) for potential solutions. The only one he can come up with is roping off the chair—something the prop manager strongly urges against. Undeterred, David tells him to proceed. But once his throne is prominently roped off on set, the show’s mere mortals give King David, and each other, the kind of looks that could spoil milk. Withering doesn’t begin to cover it.
David may have no problem being a pariah if it means getting to do whatever he wants, which seems to be the point of the entire series, but most people surely would.
Don’t hire based on affinity
When bald chef Phil Dunlop (Ian Gomez) strides into an interview with David at the restaurant he spends Season 3 opening, the two immediately click. Their mutual lack of hair, and upbeat attitude about it, make them two gleaming peas in a pod. They bond over their matching chrome domes—and eventually over David’s animosity toward those who fight against nature.
“I’m surprised Hitler didn’t round up the toupee people,” he says drily.
The chef seems a little taken aback at this dark escalation, but quickly gets on David’s wavelength, donning a German accent and barking: “‘Balden, come with me!’”
He gets the job. At least for a while.
A few episodes later, the rookie restaurateur encounters his bald chef inside a store . . . now sporting a toupee. For David, this counts as an epic betrayal. He fires Dunlop on the spot.
The chef obviously should not have deceived David—or at least shouldn’t have agreed that toupees are for degenerates—but David similarly shouldn’t have hired the guy based purely on their bald bond. While he later gets his rotund agent Jeff (Jeff Garlin) to admit he’d likely hire a “fellow fat guy,” anyone who watches the series knows Jeff isn’t the greatest judge of character. If changing just one thing about an applicant, outside of their work itself, would make a decision-maker feel any different about them, maybe don’t hire that person in the first place.
Don’t treat your assistants poorly
A running thread throughout Curb Your Enthusiasm is David’s offbeat and/or terrible assistants. One of them, played by Jillian Bell, bared a perhaps excessive amount of midriff at the office. Another, played by Carrie Brownstein, took two unannounced days off from work because she was constipated, something she later disclosed in graphic detail. And then there was the one played by Antoinette Spolar, who asked David, while combing through a doctor’s message, whether he still had “a tickle in your anus”—right in the middle of a meeting. This history of dysfunction might partly explain how David acts toward his assistant Alice (Megan Ferguson) later on, but it doesn’t excuse it.
In the Season 10 opener, he starts off on a foul note—berating Alice for not disclosing the story behind a tattoo on her arm. (“It’s personal,” she says. “Then why didn’t you put it on your ass?” he responds.) Things go from bad to worse a moment later, when David wipes the lens of his glasses with the sash from Alice’s dress. It should go without saying that this is inappropriate and crosses a boundary, but of course it doesn’t; Larry has to be told so, which seems like a surprise to him. The bigger surprise, however, comes at the end of the season, when a series of wacky coincidences leads to Alice throwing weekly loud parties in the house next door to David’s, which she owns with her new romantic partner: Mocha Joe. (Yes, it’s a spite house.) As usual, Curb demonstrates not only what terrible leadership looks like, but why it doesn’t pay off.