Curb Your Enthusiasm star and
Seinfeld cocreator and coexecutive producer Larry David
on what his mother expected of him: "Her dream was for me to work
in the post office and deliver mail," he says. "I thought, You
know, maybe she's right; it's not such a bad job. But I didn't take
the test. One day, you know, I was funny, and somebody said, 'You
should be a comedian.' So here I am."
Larry David and the other Larry David are back for the sixth
season of HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm.
By Ken Parish Perkins
When Larry David, our favorite narcissistic neurotic, finished the
fifth season of the deliciously amusing
Curb Your
Enthusiasm, he left HBO without saying whether he would
return for a sixth encounter. David went to his office in Santa
Monica, and HBO waited for his decision. He sat at his desk,
twiddled a pencil, made a few notes and a call, took a sip of
water, and noticed, in a mere 12 minutes, that he was bored. "I
went, Jeez, I don't have anything to do," David recalls. "And I
thought, This is very uncomfortable. I better do another
season."
Four Things You Don't Know
about the Young Indiana
Jones
1
Given that he was traveling the
world in the early 1900s, the
teenage Indiana Jones would have
traveled slowly to many of his
adventures by steamship. Fittingly,
the 1990s George Lucas television
series, The Young Indiana Jones
Chronicles, has taken more than a
decade to reach DVD. In part,
that's because Lucas wanted to
upgrade the series by remastering
the soundtracks and the 16 mm film.
Those tasks continue, and the
44-episode series is being released
in three volumes, the first of
which is out this month.
2 Many
states adopted compulsory
school-attendance laws before the
turn of the last century. So we
have no idea how a young Indy could
have been traveling the world
instead of doing his book learning.
Lucas is making up for that,
though. His intention is to have
the DVD series used as an
educational and entertainment tool.
David Schneider, a former 60
Minutes producer who now works for
Lucasfilm, has spent the past
several years creating
documentaries on the historical
figures and places featured in the
series. Those documentaries will
accompany each volume of the DVD
releases.
3 Before
he was Bond, Daniel Craig connected
with Sean Connery by appearing in
an episode of The Young Indiana
Jones Chronicles. Unlike Connery's
character, Indiana Jones's older
father in Indiana Jones and the
Last Crusade, Craig's character was
not related to Indy. But like
Connery, Craig - 25 at the time of
his 1993 appearance - had a
mustache. Ick.
4 While
not an instance of six degrees of
Kevin Bacon, this connection is
worth mentioning: Catherine
Zeta-Jones, Connery's costar from
1999's Entrapment, also appeared in
the Young Indiana Jones episode
with Craig. It's very interesting
that the episode with Zeta-Jones
and Craig was, like much of the
series, partly shot in an exotic
location. (Producers visited some
35 different countries, even though
the series didn't even last two
full seasons.) But what's more
interesting is that during her
appearance, Zeta-Jones does a belly
dance.
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If that sounds like it would be a perfectly prickly dilemma for
the character David plays on his show, good - it should. Now that
Curb is in its sixth season, it has become
even harder to figure out where TV Larry David ends and real Larry
David begins.
From the start, Curb Your Enthusiasm was
set up to be a slightly fictionalized version of David's real life
in Los Angeles. While real David is the misanthropic rich genius
who was behind Seinfeld and who now makes
his HBO show because he feels like it, TV David is a semiretired
sitcom legend zipping around town in his Toyota Prius, trying to
find something useful to do.
The big difference between the two, of course, is that real David
can be cordial if he wants to - or has to - whereas TV David
manages to annoy or infuriate everyone he comes in contact with.
Whether inviting a sex offender to a seder or adopting a racist
dog, David's always doing something - something that only gets
worse the more he talks. "I love the guy who's on the show," says
David about his TV character. "He says things I'm thinking and
feeling, and he doesn't have to behave in a way that society really
wants everybody to behave. I wish I could be that way in my
life."
On Location
Even if most
television shows are filmed there,
not all are set in Los Angeles … or
New York or Las Vegas. Take these
three shows that premiere this
month, for example.
THE SHOW: Life Is Wild, the
CW
THE SETTING: A game reserve, South
Africa
THE PREMISE: A New York City
father decides his family needs to
find togetherness. But instead of
choosing to spend Sunday afternoons
in Central Park, he opts to move
everyone to South Africa, where he
can put his veterinary expertise
and Brady Bunch-style lecturing
skills to work.
THE ADVANTAGE: It is cheaper to
film in South Africa (where the
series is actually shot) than in
Los Angeles. Plus, lion cubs - so
cute!
THE SHOW: Women's Murder Club,
ABC
THE SETTING: San Francisco
THE PREMISE: A James Patterson
novel series comes to life. Angie
Harmon stars as a homicide
detective who pals around with a
group of women - including an
assistant DA, a medical examiner,
and a reporter - having brunch,
drinking wine, and solving
crimes.
THE ADVANTAGE: Set in San
Francisco, this show will remind
you of Charmed, except without the
sisters, the magic book, and the
trampy outfits.
THE SHOW: Viva Laughlin, CBS
THE SETTING: Laughlin, Nevada
THE PREMISE: Based on a British
show called Viva Blackpool, this
series follows one man's attempt to
run a casino in the Vegas-lite
world of Laughlin. Hugh Jackman
serves as executive producer and
makes regular appearances. And
there are song-and-dance numbers
interspersed throughout each
episode. Yes, really.
THE ADVANTAGE: Set in Laughlin,
this show will remind you of CSI,
except with Hugh Jackman instead of
Gil Grissom and without the magic
acts and the trampy
outfits.
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Maybe the rest of us feel the same way. David specializes in
cringe television, amazingly making us root for characters who are
self-absorbed and argumentative. Seinfeld
and Curb Your Enthusiasm share that
quality. And although Curb doesn't have the
same pop-culture omnipresence as Seinfeld did, it's just as good.
Fans of this acerbic series, as was the case with Seinfeld
devotees, exchange jokes and plotlines from weekly episodes the
same way some people would trade cards.
What appeals to fans but appalls others is how typical TV
sentimentality is stripped from the language and mood of David's
work. TV David would see no shame in that approach, of course, and
real David doesn't either. "I'm getting closer to him [TV David]
every day," David says.
Nowadays, the two Davids are most like each other in their contempt
for the workings of Hollywood. Curb
Before the two Davids merge into one, will we get a seventh season?
David isn't sure. Filming has wrapped, and the season finale, which
will air in November, was "written as a could-be-the-last-show
ending or might-not-be-the-last-show ending," David says. "We'll
just see when I get back to my desk if I want to do it again."
skewers the TV and film industries' hypocrisies, but it doesn't
name names - yet. "I can get away with that," David says, "because
there's a very fine line between TV Larry and me."
Men Behaving Nicely. And
Not.
This month brings us some of the
worst good guys in television history.
"Men," says Dylan McDermott on ABC's new show Big Shots, "we're the
new women." Or so the network of Desperate Housewives, with its
overbearing, overdramatic female leads, would have us believe. Two
of ABC's newest shows - Big Shots, which premiered late last month,
and Carpoolers, which premiered October 2 - are focused on groups
of men who share their feelings. Constantly. And with each
other.
On Big Shots, one character goes to couples' therapy with his wife
and also attends therapy sessions with his mistress. On Carpoolers,
a show that's exactly what it sounds like, a group of guys who
carpool and chat incessantly, a character named Gracen (played by
Fred Goss) cries during the morning commute. Out loud. While
singing Air Supply's "All Out of Love."
Actually, he doesn't so much cry as sob. The song reminds him of
when he first became a man, so to speak. In TV seasons past, his
friends would've mocked him for this. Instead, the other carpoolers
simply nod knowingly and sing along in support.
It's nothing new for men on TV to be hapless dolts; there are a
number of them on CBS sitcoms from earlier in this decade. Take
King of Queens, for instance. But to be crying chumps? This is what
our tele-men have come to?
Maybe not. Also joining this month's morass of males is a former
member of Jackass, the, according to USA Network, "indomitable
Steve-O - a member of a dying breed of live-life-to-the-max
daredevils who is disgusted with the alarming number of [wimpified]
men" in America. This includes, we assume, Dylan McDermott.
In Dr. Steve-O, Steve-O himself travels the country at the request
of girlfriends, wives, and others who are fed up with their male
pals' wimpy behavior. To cure them, Steve-O prescribes a series of
dares. (That's a scary thought when you recall that Steve-O once
had his posterior pierced together for a TV stunt.)
Is Dr. Steve-O ridiculous? Sure. Is it needed, given the other new
men on TV this month? Well, that just depends on how you feel about
Air Supply.