‘The Alpha and Omega of Bickering’: Jeff Schaffer on the Series Finale of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’
One might think that a showrunner and director would feel an intense degree of pressure heading toward the finale of a series widely regarded as one of the greatest comedies in the history of television, but Jeff Schaffer was surprisingly relaxed when heading into the home stretch on HBO‘s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.” “I think we would have felt a lot of pressure knowing this was the final season if we hadn’t had so much practice with final seasons,” Schaffer told IndieWire’s Filmmaker Toolkit podcast. “We have ended the show, I don’t know, seven times? I mean, the final episode of Season 5 was called ‘The End,’ and that was not ironic.”
Schaffer realized long ago that “Curb” star and creator Larry David tends to view each season as the last, for a logical reason. “He puts every joke he likes, every story he likes, into the season. When he’s done, he doesn’t have any more stories, so why would he possibly do another season? He, of course, is the only person on the planet who thinks he’s not going to come up with any more ideas.” According to Schaffer, every time a season ends David insists they’ll never do another one — and then he gets a new idea, and another, until suddenly he and Schaffer are on the phone with HBO about doing another year.
With that in mind, Schaffer didn’t really go into Season 12 thinking it would be the last, but where the story went organically lent itself to a perfect finale. David had the idea that his character would be arrested in Georgia for giving water to people in a voting line, which led to the natural conclusion that the season would finish with a trial. “We didn’t know if we were going to do a trial, honestly, because we had done one in the season finale of ‘Seinfeld,'” Schaffer said. “It wasn’t until we were playing around with another idea where Larry was like, ‘I’m 76 years old. I’ve never learned a lesson in my life.'”
That led to the idea that “Curb” would repeat the series finale of “Seinfeld” — a finale that was controversial and not entirely embraced by fans — to show that David had, indeed, never learned his lesson. “‘I was like, ‘Why don’t we just own that? Let’s just do the trial. Let’s tell the world that you’ve never learned your lesson. Let’s steer that Titanic right back at the iceberg,'” Schaffer said. “And once that happened, things started to fall into place because the only way that story is funniest is if you announce to the world it’s the final season. That’s the only reason it’s the final season — because it was only funniest if it were the final season.”
Ironically, in repeating the “mistake” of “Seinfeld” Schaffer and David created an immensely satisfying, hilarious series finale that does in fact indicate they’ve learned something; a sequence in which witnesses show up on the stand to catalog David’s past crimes is both outrageously funny in its own right and a perfect summation of the comic sensibility that made “Curb Your Enthusiasm” so brilliant. Given the wealth of material to choose from, Schaffer had to be rigorous about making sure that the clips from previous episodes made sense within the context of the trial.
“You can throw a rock and Larry’s committed some sort of war crime,” Schaffer said. “So the question really was out of the large buffet, the entire Souplantation of crimes that Larry has committed, what are we going to pull? Some of the things that are most memorable aren’t actually crimes. They wouldn’t have fit into the structure of a trial. So there’s a self-selection where certain things just don’t fit because this is not a clip show — and it was very important for us that this did not feel like a clip show.”
It was also important to Schaffer and David that they find a funny and appropriate way to say goodbye to their cast, which they did with a set piece in which everyone is arguing over window shades on an airplane. The scene yields a perfect final shot, but it wasn’t even originally conceived as the season finale — or for this season at all. “We shot that scene in Season 9 and we shot it again in Season 10, because when you’re on a plane you want to put all these plane jokes in,” Schaffer said. “Each time it was the fifth or sixth beat and it’s like, ‘How long are we gonna be on this plane?'”
Schaffer knew that he had an ending with David and Jerry Seinfeld in which they reference the “Seinfeld” finale, which has been followed beat by beat, but he needed to follow it with something including the entire ensemble. “It was that scene that we’ve loved, that we’ve literally filmed two times before, but this one was very different because we’ve got everybody there,” Schaffer said. Originally Schaffer ended on David, but while editing he decided to finish on a tableau of everyone yelling. “We wanted people to think that these characters will be doing the exact same thing forever. We leave them as we found them, right? The alpha and omega of bickering.”
Having Jerry Seinfeld involved in the finale was especially satisfying for Schaffer, a longtime collaborator of both Seinfeld and David. “I think Larry was very happy and Jerry was very happy and that made me really happy,” Schaffer said, “because I was there back then on ‘Seinfeld’ with them too. So it’s sort of a testament. We were able to hang around long enough, as Jerry said, to do a 26-year joke. Which was cool.”
