How Curb Your Enthusiasm's Seinfeld Ending Came To Be, According To Director

Episode director Jeff Schaffer explains how the Curb Your Enthusiasm finale's Seinfeld ending came about.

Curb Your Enthusiasm ended its quarter-century run on HBO with an episode calling back to the infamous Seinfeld finale, but that wasn't always the plan, as episode director Schaffer reveals, explaining how the ending arose during the course of writing season 12, and what the choice to revisit the divisive final episode of Seinfeld says about Larry David. Check out his remarks below (via Variety):

This was not the plan when we were even starting Season 12. We knew that we were starting with Georgia and that idiotic law, and when you start that way, it feels like a trial is maybe in the offing, but we weren’t even settled on a trial. Honestly, we were writing episodes and talking about a story where Larry gets involved with a kid who’s done something wrong, like thrown a ball at his head, and the mom is trying to teach him a lesson and Larry doesn’t want to be a part of the lesson. As we were acting that out, Larry says, “I’m 76 years old and I’ve never learned a lesson in my life.”

As we were joking about that, we realized that’s how we do this. We tell everyone that Larry has never learned a lesson in his life, and then we go on trial like the “Seinfeld” finale and we just own it. We’re gonna run back into that burning building, and if you didn’t like it — tough. Oftentimes we blur the lines between real Larry and TV Larry. Lots of times, TV Larry does things that real Larry would never do or always wanted to do. But both Larrys have never learned a lesson. That’s what I love about this finale. [With “Seinfeld,”] Larry did what he thought was funny. And then he did it again.