The following story contains spoilers for the end of Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 12, “No Lessons Learned.”
AFTER NEARLY 24 years, 12 seasons, and 120 episodes, the final curtain seems to have descended on Curb Your Enthusiasm, HBO and Larry David’s loosely-structured sitcom afraid of exactly zero uncomfortable social situations. Things came to a conclusion with the 10th episode of Season 12, titled “No Lessons Learned,” where the season-long storyline—Larry is on trial in Georgia for bringing Auntie Rae (Ellia English) a bottle of water while she waited in line to vote, a bizarre-but-real election law in the state—wrapped up with a trial that brought people from the Seinfeld co-creator’s past and present back.
Those people included callbacks to both episodes earlier this season (Bruce Springsteen) and 20+ years ago (Tara Michaelson, a now-grown woman who had a run-in with Larry way back in Season 2’s “The Doll”) as character witnesses to paint a (rather unflattering) picture of who Curb‘s version of “Larry” really is.
It was all rather satisfying, a finale episode that not only brought things full circle with the story of “Larry David” and Curb Your Enthusiasm, but also got a chance to re-assess the Seinfeld finale—which ended with an almost identical trial, and has garnered a contentious reputation throughout the years to say the least.
But this isn’t the first time that Curb has seemingly come to a conclusion. Is Season 12 really the end? Let’s take a look and consider the possibilities.
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Will there be a Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 13, or is the show really ending?
Every part of Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 12 has pointed toward it being the final season. “As Curb comes to an end, I will now have the opportunity to finally shed this ‘Larry David’ persona and become the person God intended me to be—the thoughtful, kind, caring, considerate human being I was until I got derailed by portraying this malignant character,” Larry said in an HBO press release.
However, J.B. Smoove, who’s played Leon on Curb since Season 6, expressed doubts that the show would actually be ending in an interview with Men’s Health. “I’m not going to call him a liar—I just don’t believe Larry,” he said. “Some of us have this impulse where we feel, Ooh, I gotta address that.”
There have also been times along the show’s lengthy run where it seemed like things could’ve been coming to an end. Season 5’s “The End” featured a sequence where Larry dies and goes to heaven, before being sent back to his body after getting into a fight with a pair of angels (Dustin Hoffman and Sacha Baron Cohen). That title and conclusion would seem like a fitting place to end for just about any other show. There was also the lengthy break after Season 8, which aired in 2011, and Season 9, which aired in 2017; at any point in that gap, it seemed like the further away from the show we got, the less likely it would be to return.
But return it did. Curb would air for four more seasons, giving way to the evidence that makes us, unfortunately, begin to believe that the show really has concluded. There was a report after Season 11 aired in 2021 that the show filmed an alternate death scene for Larry, providing an ending for the modern classic in case there was a decision to end things right then and there. That shows that prior to Season 12, the thought was at least there about finally wrapping things up.
The realty of things is that Larry saw an opportunity to properly end his long-running project on his own terms. “It’s time,” he told Variety earlier in the year. “Twelve seasons—that’s a lot for a television show—over 24 years. It was time.”
He even acknowledged that he’s teased the show’s conclusion before. “Yeah, I said it before,” he said in the same interview. “But I wasn’t 76 when I said it.”
The final season—and, in particular, final episode—of Curb‘s 12th season feels how a final season, and final episode, should feel. It calls back to the show’s most notable points, and, David even calls attention to his age for the first time in the show’s lengthy history. “I’m 76 years old, and I’ve never learned a lesson in my entire life,” he tells a young boy in “No Lessons Learned.”
If that’s not Curb Your Enthusiasm in a nutshell, then what is?
