At long last, the final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm has arrived. Since the HBO comedy premiered in 2000, creator and star Larry David has spent 110 episodes shocking and delighting us—often by exploring taboo subjects other writers might be too afraid to touch. Practically every episode involves Larry getting embroiled in some web of misunderstandings and bad-faith interpretations, offending people wherever he goes. It’s a quality that rarely extends to real life, where David has mostly managed to avoid any concentrated backlash.
Perhaps in some ways, Curb resists traditional criticism when it comes to material aging poorly. Re-watching the show, it’s easy to spot certain jokes that wouldn’t be made today, if only out of fear of (often justifiable) pushback—but just as often, those edgy riffs hold up because they’re grounded in Larry’s very specific, skewed way of viewing a constantly changing culture. Besides, as in series like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, depiction doesn’t always equal endorsement; even at his most reasonable, Larry never claims to be a moral authority, and he almost always gets punished for his ignorance.
Still, in looking back at the last 11 seasons, some episodes still stand out as particularly bold—the ones that make me gasp even on a third or fourth re-watch. With season 12 starting on Feb. 4, let’s take a look at 10 of them.
Read more: The Uncancellable Larry David
Season 1, Episode 10: “The Group”
In future seasons of Curb, final episodes would usually serve to resolve the ongoing season-long storylines. But Season 1, the show’s narratively loosest, climaxed with a particularly wild self-contained episode. When Larry’s ex-girlfriend Lucy (Melanie Smith) asks him to attend an incest survivors group with her, he makes up his own false abuse story to set the other women at ease about his presence, embellishing with extraneous details about his uncle Leo. There’s also a lot of dark comedy with another…
