Larry David’s Last Stand
As the series finale of ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ approaches, everything, it seems, has been building toward one of David’s most strongly held beliefs: that, actually, the ‘Seinfeld’ finale was pretty, pretty goodHow does David Mandel remember the reaction to the Seinfeld series finale? He’s not even sure his parents liked it.
America was angry that day, my friends, and the show’s supervising producer knew why. The last episode, Mandel says, “distilled the characters to their most basic form. Much of the audience did not want to be confronted by that.”
In the two-part closer, which aired on May 14, 1998, Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer watch—and laugh at—a small-town man getting carjacked. They’re subsequently arrested for breaking a good Samaritan law and put on trial. Naturally, the prosecutor on the case calls witnesses/former guest stars who have one thing in common: they’ve all been mistreated by the cold-hearted quartet. The jury convicts them and the judge comes down hard. “Your callous indifference and utter disregard for everything that is good and decent has rocked the very foundation upon which our society is built,” he says, before sentencing all four to a year in prison.
Up to this point, Larry David’s foundational mantra of “no hugging, no learning” had generated thousands of laughs. But the final episode, which he came back to write, was harsh enough to throw off more than a few fans and critics. “Returning cocreator David turns spiteful, unforgiving moralist,” Ken Tucker wrote in Entertainment Weekly. “This crew led miserable lives, and we relished their exceptional pettiness. That they should be punished for all the vicarious fun we had at their expense is David’s way of saying we never should have made these cruel losers Must See-worthy.”
Though there was never any sign of it happening, people still hoped for a redemption arc. “They expected Jerry and Elaine to get married and for Kramer to do a wacky ceremony,” Mandel says. “And I don’t know, George and Marisa Tomei to hook up at the reception.”
Viewers back then likely expected the type of closure they got with M*A*S*H and Cheers. A bittersweet goodbye that sent everyone off in new directions. But they clearly didn’t realize what David stood for, and what he was capable of. He wasn’t going to let sentimentality step on the joke. This was the way he thought Seinfeld should end, and that’s that. “I always took solace in the fact that he did exactly what he wanted to do,” Mandel says. “I didn’t agree with the [reviews], and I also didn’t care. And I knew Larry certainly didn’t care, or at least maybe at that point.”
If we’ve learned anything about David over the past quarter century, it’s that he’s deeply, hilariously committed to his shtick. Which isn’t really shtick at all. At its shriveled heart, Curb Your Enthusiasm is a look into the mind of the kind of guy who’d make a show about nothing. The kind of guy who’ll always double down on what he would laugh at, no matter what anyone else thinks. The kind of guy who would, in a Season 7 episode of Curb, push back on, say, Jason Alexander framing a Seinfeld cast reunion as a chance to make up for the sins of the finale. “What does that mean, make up for the finale?” Larry asks. “There’s nothing to make up for.”
David has sprinkled that particular defiance throughout Curb Your Enthusiasm, but this final season is his coup de grâce. Everything, it seems, has been building toward one ultimate rebuke of the reaction to the most infamous moment in David’s career. As the HBO series comes to a close on Sunday, there once again will be courtroom drama. And though the main character will be the one sitting in the defendant’s chair, that series finale from 26 years ago is the thing that’ll truly be on trial. None of this should surprise anyone who’s actually seen the Seinfeld finale. The main characters may have learned absolutely nothing in it, but the episode taught us a lot about Larry David.

David has never cared about giving people what they want, though choosing to end Seinfeld in a crowd-pleasing way would’ve been excusable. After all, the show was a national obsession. There’s even a nod to its popularity in the last episode. When the new NBC president, played by Peter Riegert, green-lights Seinfeld’s long-dead sitcom-within-a-sitcom Jerry, he says he wants “something that would have people talking at the watercoolers.” George responds with this: “See, I think people would talk about it at the coffee machines.”
In reality, the conversation around Seinfeld wasn’t confined to offices. “People just don’t understand that Seinfeld aired 9 o’clock on Thursday, and starting Friday, the morning DJs started talking about Seinfeld at 6 a.m. on the commute, and it went on all day,” Mandel says. “And when you got in line at a movie theater Friday night for a new release, people were talking about it. By the way, no one gets in line anymore.”
By the ninth and last season of the show, hype about the ending crested. In 1998, Newsweek allegedly got a reporter into the taping of the final episode. Jerry Seinfeld even addressed the studio audience with this: “Well, aren’t you all hot shit? And don’t tell me you haven’t been working it. You’re at the Kennedy assassination and you’ve got your seats on the grassy knoll.”
Nielsen estimated that 76.3 million viewers tuned in to the last episode of Seinfeld, making it the fourth most watched television finale since 1960. That’s an astronomically high number by any era’s standard, especially today’s. In a world where the NFL and almost nothing else consistently pulls in huge audiences, there are barely any truly widely watched scripted shows left. “There’s only the Super Bowl,” Mandel says. “Once a year. And we can all just kind of go, ‘We were all watching it.’ People don’t understand that that used to exist with TV shows, and it happened more frequently than you would think.”
The monoculture’s last gasp may have been in 2019, when 19.3 million people watched the Game of Thrones finale. Four years later, the Succession finale–the TV event of the year—drew only 2.9 million.
The ’90s were just different. In those days, Herb Scannell was the president of TV Land. The cable channel, which hit the airwaves in 1996, had a lineup full of classic shows. When it came time to program something opposite the Seinfeld finale, Scannell decided to simply give up. “We’d have a weekly meeting and somebody said, ‘What are we going to do about Seinfeld?’” Scannell remembers. “I was like, ‘Oh, what are we going to do about Seinfeld?’” Then one of his colleagues had an idea. What about putting up a version of a “Gone Fishin’” sign? “We want to be watching [Seinfeld]. We’re TV fans,” Scannell says. “Isn’t our audience TV fans? Won’t they want to watch it, too?”
So, during the Seinfeld finale, the only thing that appeared on TV Land was a title card that read, “We’re TV fans, so … we’re watching the last episode of Seinfeld. Will return at 10 p.m. ET, 7 p.m. PT.”
Everyone was watching the finale. On the night the episode aired, legendary singer and actor Frank Sinatra died of a heart attack at age 82. That evening, the ambulance transporting him reportedly made it from Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to his Los Angeles home in “four minutes flat.” According to the New York Daily News, Beverly Hills fire chief Mike Stollen claimed to know why the streets were so wide open: Everyone was busy watching the end of Seinfeld.

That evening 26 years ago, the last episode of Seinfeld was the main event. But the undercard was unexpectedly thrilling. Before “The Finale,” NBC aired “The Chronicle,” a clip show retrospective that was essentially a collection of Seinfeld’s funniest moments. 58.5 million people watched it.
The problem was that the finale also did plenty of rehashing. “The Chronicle” was like a highlight reel of Michael Jordan in his prime. The risk was that watching it first would make “The Finale” feel like a compilation of MJ’s time as a Washington Wizard. “At some point, I remember we talked about, ‘Can we stop the clip show? Could the clip show air the following week?’” Mandel says. “And there was no getting out of it that night. And I can’t [say] how hard anyone actually tried, but we were not unaware that you were watching a great clip show, and then you were watching an episode that had a real clip show element to it. I’m not sure anyone in the audience would identify that as a problem, but I will go to my grave believing that was a problem—that it threw people because it just felt like more of the same and not unto itself. That’s my own little theory.”
Mostly, though, Mandel believes that fans just couldn’t quite get over what the finale said about the characters they loved. He’d seen similar reactions once before, after the Season 7 finale. In “The Invitations,” the last episode David wrote before the series finale,” George’s fiancée, Susan, licks about 200 envelopes, not realizing that the adhesive on them is toxic. After she abruptly dies, neither George nor anyone else seems too broken up about it.
Mandel remembers angry letters pouring into the network. “‘How dare they?!’ All of a sudden, the retired grandma in Boca who loves the show was sort of like, ‘Oh, George is a sweetheart!’” he says. “No, he’s not. And all of a sudden, you’re confronted that they’re not super nice.”
That harsh—and darkly funny—truth was pure David, who’s never backed off his contention that the bleak Seinfeld finale was a triumph. Mandel was working on Curb Your Enthusiasm in 2009 when David brought Seinfeld, Alexander, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Michael Richards back for the Season 7 reunion arc. “We had characters going, ‘We can make up for the finale,’” Mandel says. “And Larry got half-real, half-fake angry, saying, ‘It’s a good finale!’ I think [Curb] spoon-fed the audience—reminding them that it wasn’t quite so bad.”
A decade later, Mandel sat down to write a finale of his own as the showrunner of Veep. Old memories came rushing back, and when he felt self-doubt creeping in, he tried to channel his old boss. “At the end of the day, it was like Larry,” he says. “He just did what he wanted to do, be damned. … I reminded myself that’s the only way you can do it. In the same way, if Larry had tried to write whatever it is that the audience thinks they might want, then it probably would’ve sucked.”
The Veep finale, which aired the same night as the penultimate episode of Game of Thrones in May 2019, got overwhelmingly positive reviews. But doing press afterward left Mandel slightly frustrated. “You want questions about it and about ‘Why is it good?’ or ‘Why did you do this?’” he says. “And instead, at the time, I think I got a lot of questions about basically people not liking that night’s Game of Thrones. And then the following week, not liking the finale. And then I also got some questions about how the Seinfeld finale wasn’t good, but this one was. And it’s just like, ‘These are not questions I particularly want to answer.’”
The experience was a reminder that people fixate on a show’s ending, whether it’s ambiguous, uplifting, shocking, sweet, sour, or like Seinfeld, a little mean. Love it or hate it, it’s what they remember. But David has never worried—or cared—about the burden that comes with that. He made what he thought was funny.
It was only natural that David would end Seinfeld with the gang getting its comeuppance. It was his over-the-top way of pointing out something that he always knew: People, even buddies, tend to be horrible to one another. “Larry’s comedy, at least from my perspective, is what it’s like when I’m sitting at 2 o’clock in the morning in an actual deli or coffee shop with my idiot friends who I’ve known forever,” Mandel says. “And they are my best friends in the world, but at no point do we stop for me to remind them that they are my best friends. At no point, as we’re getting up, do I hug them. If they tried to shake my hand, I’d push them away. [The finale] was the closest representation I’d ever seen to actual real life.”
So when the Curb Your Enthusiasm finale airs on Sunday night, don’t expect a warm embrace from David, or a mea culpa for the end of Seinfeld. While insisting that he’s on the right side of history once more, he’ll say goodbye the only way he knows how: by making us laugh, and then pushing us away before we get too close.