Curb Your Enthusiasm: is it the greatest comedy of all time?

The latest season of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm arrived recently without a great deal of fanfare or promotion. It just happens to be the cleverest comedy around.

Curb Your Enthusiasm star and creator Larry David

The latest season of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm arrived recently without a great deal of fanfare or promotion locally. It just happens to be the cleverest comedy around and has been since 1999, starring Larry David, co-creator of Seinfeld, as a fictional version of himself, a bald, Jewish, abrasive, sardonic and self-absorbed Hollywood writer whose best efforts in life backfire comically.

And as usual they do throughout this 11th season, the overarching plot line to do with Larry’s problems after he finds a would-be burglar dead facedown in his fenceless swimming pool, which he quickly discovers doesn’t meet Santa Monica’s building requirements.

Then there’s the manifold problems that quickly emerge with a new show he’s pitching to Netflix about his early life, which get worse and worse the more he tries to resolve them. The season also stars Jon Hamm, Seth Rogen, Woody Harrelson, Lucy Liu and Tracey Ullman as local Councilwoman Irma Kostroski who is simply deliciously repulsive and hysterically funny, Larry dating her – there’s an ulterior motive at work of course – even though he loathes her.

Few comics have ever exacted so many laughs from the minutiae of existence, his comedy a mirror of the foibles and the fears, the bewilderment and frustration facing any of us trying to keep pace with an increasingly formidable world.

He might be incredible wealthy but he has a bloodhound’s scent for the cliches of our existence, however slight and trivial they might be.

And his train wreck encounters with social niceties and day-to-day protocols might make us cringe but a part of us knows that so often he is right.

In 2005, to promote the fifth season of Curb, HBO went with a rather lateral advertising campaign. It presented a collection of bodies, male and female, in business suits and bathrobes, all bearing Larry David’s head. The tagline went: “Deep inside you know you’re him.”

And the TV Larry is the embodiment of all the things we secretly detest in ourselves – the self-importance, stubbornness, petulance and suspicion. He says or does whatever he thinks, and the show is built around the way he reacts to the various misfortunes that inevitably happen to him. And usually adds to them, increasing their intensity so they quickly become calamities. This despite the best efforts of his group of old friends who by now must be wondering whether he is in fact losing his marbles.

Jeff Schaffer, one of his writers says, he’s the guy “who speaks for those who have no voice. The one who’s going to actually say, ‘These are injustices, these are social injustices. These will not stand.’ ”

And, says Schaffer, “He knows how to swing from one to the other, amazingly, sometimes in the same scene. And that’s what makes the show. He’s dealing with actual issues and he can flop from side to side, depending on what’s funny.”

Each season is a kind of absurdist jigsaw puzzle as you keep trying to work out how such a large number of seemingly unconnected but obviously intricately plotted stories will eventually fit together at the end. And they always do. This is always a bit of a miracle as the stories are in fact semi-scripted and partially improvised by the large group of players, most of them experienced comics who delight in ad libbing. The actors work off a rough outline of how scenes will go, and fill in the blanks with dialogue.

David calls Larry “the idealised version of how I want to be” and says he would be much happier in his life if he was just like him. Though recently he said during an appearance on Conan O’Brien’s Late show that he thought he had become too much like the guy he calls “TV Larry”, and that he had been taken over by that TV guy.

“I’m hurting people; I’m hurting people’s feelings,” he muttered in a kind of comic exasperation.

Certainly in the TV interviews he did to promote the new season there seemed little demarcation between the real Larry David and the extreme fictional “TV guy”.

He told one funny, telling story. The new show was shot during Covid, though it’s very much a post-pandemic series, with few mentions of the deprivations of Covid.

He told Jimmy Kimmel how with every one in his crew wearing masks he hadn’t seen anyone’s face for a year. He asked them to take the masks off after the final scene was shot. They did and he looked around and simply said: “Ah ha, put ’em back on.” That’s Larry.

Trigger Point is another drama from the seemingly irrepressible Jed Mercurio, a writer and producer with a gift for the winding, twisting and curling plot like few others. He’s the TV creator who has taken the cop procedural to new heights, the man behind smash hit dramas Line of Duty and Bodyguard.

And more recently the slow-burning Belfast-set Bloodlands, which underlined just how issues stemming from the violent Irish conflict, still euphemistically called the “Troubles”, are inextricably bound up with issues of national identity.

Bloodlands was the first series from Mercurio’s new production company HTM Television and his stories are topical, brutal, tragic and mesmerising, treachery coming from all directions.

And Trigger Point, to judge from the first episode, is no exception, a visceral look at counter-terrorism policing in the UK and the work of London’s Metropolitan Police Bomb Disposal Squad, known as “expos” for “experienced bomb disposal operatives.”

Mercurio is executive producer of the new six-part series which is written by newcomer Daniel Brierley, his debut television drama commission. Mercurio’s second collaboration with an up-and-coming talent – the first was with Chris Brandon on Bloodlands – as part of a TV bursary scheme, funded by the industry body ScreenSkills with the aim of encouraging top screenwriters to mentor an up-and-coming writer of their choice.

The series reunites Mercurio with Line of Duty star Vicky McClure, who plays the lead role as frontline officer Lana Washington, an experienced bomb-disposal operative, opposite redoubtable Adrian Lester as Joel Nutkins, working alongside her. Both are ex-military, which is usually the case for operatives, the pair obviously close after both serving in Afghanistan, their banter easy and convivial.

Brierley’s script is tight and as twisty as one might expect given the involvement of Mercurio, the first episode shot in the same place by Gillies Bannier (Marcella, Tin Star), a single location, and in a single time period. Superbly orchestrated it is too, the action operatic and convincing, but Bannier also pays close attention to the etiquette and protocols of bomb disposal.

And the show for all its rigorously dramatised procedural elements is really about the courage of the bomb disposal operator, making what’s called the “long walk” to a bomb with the intention of making it safe.

Whether dropped by the Luftwaffe or planted by terrorists, this, more than anything, has stayed the same in the violent world of bomb disposal, along with the constant risk of post-traumatic stress disorder, which given the events of the first episode may play a part as Brierley’s narrative develops.

And it must be terrifying no matter how experienced the operator, something that McClure’s Washington conveys with a disturbing sense of realism.

It starts with London sweltering in a heatwave, the two operatives called to an emerging police operation investigating a possible bomb factory on the fourth floor of a residential tower block in London. As people are still being rushed from the building the two expos follow the SWAT team into one of the apartments and discover a mother and a child, who say they’ve been tied up by terrorists, and a sophisticated IED (improvised exploding device) rigged up in the bathroom which would have been detonated by a flick of the light switch.

Next they have to employ a bomb disposal robot when they discover Andy Phelan, husband and father to the traumatised residents of the flat, tightly bound and wrapped in a bomb, somehow climbing out of the boot of his car, also rigged with explosives.

And it all goes pear-shaped when the robot malfunctions, possibly sabotaged.

The thrills keep coming and the ending to this first episode is totally unexpected.

Mercurio is convinced the best TV thrillers are based on the fundamental elements of jeopardy and mystery. And in Trigger Point: “The jeopardy is built around bombs. Will they blow up or will the team led by the expos stop them? And the mystery is where the next bomb is going to be and who’s behind the plot.”

He’s got me.

Curb Your Enthusiasm streaming on Foxtel On Demand and Binge

Trigger Point streaming on Stan.