In Life, Larry, And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness, Larry David stars in sketches that puts his own particular brand of cantankerousness at the center of important moments in U.S. history. Larry is either playing a historic figure, like in a sketch where he plays Alexander Graham Bell or one where he plays Joe McCarthy, or he plays someone adjacent to that historic figure or event, like Rosa Parks’ seatmate. In all cases, though, he’s really just playing a version of himself from Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Opening Shot: “This 4th of July marks America’s 250th birthday,” Barack Obama says as he walks through a museum display about the founding of the country. When he reaches a display showing some wax figures of the Founding Fathers, one of them is moving, and taking exception to what the former president is saying about how cantankerous and flawed some of them were.
The Gist: Larry David appears in every sketch in Life, Larry, And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness, and they eventually become costumed mini-episodes of Curb, with Larry airing various grievances about life, mostly of the small, interpersonal variety. For instance, he rails against sharing desserts, not being able to hang up on an awkward phone call, and faking compliments about someone else’s girlfriend in the first episode, among many other complaints.
As with Curb, the show features a ton of guest stars, many of whom are able to improvise with Larry like they did on that show. Among the ones that have already been announced, the first episode boasts guests like Chris Parnell and Alan Tudyk, and many others we can’t mention. The second episode has JB Smoove, Jon Hamm, Sean Hayes, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and many other guests.
Some of the topics covered in the first two epsiodes: The creation of the Declaration of Independence, trench warfare during World War I, Rosa Parks’ bus protest, the invention of the telephone, the Boston Tea Party, the McCarthy hearings, the Underground Railroad, and the Wright Brothers.
What Shows Will It Remind You Of? Like we mentioned above, Life, Larry, And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness is basically a historic, sketchified version of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Our Take: David and Curb veteran Jeff Schaffer wrote and are the showrunners for Life, Larry, And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness, which is produced by Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground. That is probably one of the reasons why the former president appears in the cold open of the first episode and in a lot of the promotional material.
In a lot of ways, the show plays like Curb‘s greatest hits, with David ranting about things that we know he’s ranted about over the past 27 years on Curb. If we haven’t heard these complaints there, we heard them during interviews where Larry the person gladly takes on Larry the character’s aggreived personality (to be honest, even Larry has alluded to the fact that he’s likes acting like Curb Larry IRL).
That’s not a good thing, and not just because we’ve heard much of what we’re seeing in these sketches before. The idea is that we’re basically dropping Curb Larry into all sorts of historic contexts, and the celebrity narrator (whom we can’t mention) gives that context before each sketch. So now, instead of a half-hour that has a modicum of plot peppered with Curb Larry’s rants, we get a concentrated hit of Curb Larry in 7-to-15-minute sketches. All of Curb Larry’s complaints, all of his weirdness, and all of his honest but unexpected reactions to things that other people would throw niceities at.
But the problem we saw in the first two episodes was that we weren’t finding it funny. It especially didn’t work in sketches that were more scripted and structured, like the McCarthy and Declaration of Independence sketches. There were times when David was in the improvisational flow with longtime scene partners like Smoove when we at least saw the potential of transferring the Curb sensibility to this format. But in many others, David yelling while others stared at him just didn’t work.
It could be that it’s just too big of a juxtaposition for even David and Schaffer to overcome. It could also just feel too repetitive. Like we said, it’s a high concentration of Curb Larry in each sketch. But we were shocked at how little we found funny in the first two episodes.
Performance Worth Watching: We enjoyed the presence of each and every guest star during the first two episodes. We wish we could name all of them. We’ll give this to Smoove, whose chemistry with David is unmatched.
Sex And Skin: None.
Parting Shot: The last sketch of the first episode involves Rosa Parks. But we can’t mention who plays Rosa Parks, what role David has in the sketch, or what the sketch is about.
Sleeper Star: There were actually points where we saw David actually acting, and we were shocked that he wasn’t half bad.
Most Pilot-y Line: Let’s just say that David as a young doughboy in WWI is a huge stretch.
Our Call: SKIP IT. Life, Larry And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness feels like a hybrid that no one asked for, but at least we found out that we don’t want such a concentrated dose of the Curb version of Larry David.
Joel Keller (@joelkeller) writes about food, entertainment, parenting and tech, but he doesn’t kid himself: he’s a TV junkie. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, RollingStone.com, VanityFair.com, Fast Company and elsewhere.
