CYE Marathon on now

Probably my favorite show on television right now.

Glad the new season is starting up Sunday.

 

Sweet 'Sex and the City' gives way to a rude 'Curb'

By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
New York Times

There is still no sexual equality in comedy. For women, historically too easily despised and made the butt of jokes, the victory is in pulling off a comic character that is both laughable and laudable: Lucy Ricardo in the '50s, Mary Richards in the '70s or Carrie Bradshaw in the '90s. For men, humor lies in blurring the line between lovable and loathsome: Ralph Kramden, Archie Bunker and now Larry David.

Some viewers may be tempted to read something sinister into the end of Sex and the City and the ascendancy of David's Curb Your Enthusiasm, which begins its fourth season Sunday, both on HBO. There is of course a vivid streak of misogyny running through Curb, in which David plays a more twisted version of himself. Almost all the women in it are hostile, humorless and incapable of overlooking the hero's most innocent missteps. In one typical scene Larry enrages a lesbian receptionist when he suggests that she and her partner name their adopted Chinese baby Tang. ("It's a juice," Larry explains, "but it has Chinese overtones.")

Sexism, however, is merely a subset of the misanthropy that veins Curb and makes it so distinctive. (No minority group is spared David's mean streak, not the rich, the gay, the blind, the good looking or the disabled.) And the one good thing about the 14-month hiatus since the last season of Curb is that it allows viewers to experience David's jarring rudeness anew.

It takes at least two episodes for David's TV persona -- the cantankerous, self-absorbed Hollywood writer whose best intentions always go horribly awry -- to regain some degree of cozy familiarity. And that discomfort is one of the things that make Curb Your Enthusiasm so unusual and so funny.

Sex and the City, which is also returning Sunday, after a five-month pause, for Part 2 of its sixth and final season, long ago stopped being disturbing. The once-daring series is now all too cozily familiar, and so, too, is the chill winter frost creeping through the cracks. After a giddy, prolonged girlhood, its four heroines are confronting middle age.

Curb -- centered around ordinary-looking, mostly married 40- and 50-year-olds -- is suddenly the frothy, outre HBO series; it has relegated Sex and the City to the status of Bonanza. (And not just because by now the four heroines tripping down Manhattan streets to the strains of cocktail-lounge music seem a bit like the Cartwrights galloping across the Ponderosa.)

Sex and the City has matured into a beloved television war horse that has kept going longer than anyone could expect and is finally ready to retire, with dignity, a bit belatedly. The only suspense is whether Carrie, the hardened spinster played by Sarah Jessica Parker, marries in the final episode or rides off alone into the tequila sunrise.

Obviously it did not start out that way. When it began in 1998, the show was impudent, ribald and anthropological: an amused but intimate look at the mating rituals of the young, attractive female sophisticate in Manhattan. It drew a huge female following, women who felt the show expressed their own concerns and predicaments.

The only cultural milestone achieved by David's show when it began two years later was atavistic: It recaptured some of the grumpy humor of Seinfeld, the sitcom he created in 1990, as well as the caustic mock-cinema-verite style of Garry Shandling's send-up of late-night talk shows, The Larry Sanders Show.

For his fourth season David has introduced a new leitmotif: Larry is cast as Max Bialystock in the Broadway production of The Producers. Mel Brooks sees him sing Swanee at a karaoke party in Los Angeles and is instantly convinced that Larry, who cannot sing, dance or act, is perfect for the part.

Larry is easily persuaded, and his misplaced self-confidence is only one of the insufferable traits that vex his co-star, Ben Stiller, who is playing Leo Bloom. Their strained relationship in rehearsals and at social gatherings begins to mirror the tensions of the characters they portray in the musical.

In an already rich canvas of acquaintances who endure Larry -- some with resigned dismay like his manager, Jeff (Jeff Garlin), others with screamed profanities like Jeff's wife, Susie (Susie Essman) -- Stiller is an inspired addition. He plays a Hollywood-mellow actor struggling to suppress his fury. ("I'm saying this as a friend," he tells Larry, goaded beyond endurance. "You have a ways to go when it comes to dealing with people.")

The Producers gambit introduces new characters and themes, but also weaves in old ones; Michael (Patrick Kerr), the blind man who once bullied Larry and his best friend, Richard Lewis, into helping him move, reappears as the rehearsal pianist for the play. He is escorted by a dumpy, sour woman who has convinced her sightless beau that she is a model. Only Larry feels compelled to disabuse him.

The sunny malevolence of Curb contrasts all the more sharply this season with the melancholy sweetness of Sex and the City. Time and experience have smoothed the heroines' sharper angles. Miranda, the cynical lawyer played by Cynthia Nixon, has fallen in love with Steve, the father of her child. Even Samantha (Kim Cattrall), the sexual swashbuckler, has found a form of commitment with her younger lover, Smith, and is more preoccupied with health issues than sex. Charlotte (Kristin Davis), happily married to Harry, is struggling with infertility.

Only Carrie, still adorable, still admirable, remains unmarked. Her latest romance with a famous, older artist, Aleksandr Petrovsky, played by Mikhail Baryshnikov, was supposed to add a surprising new twist to a dragging plot. Yet for all his Slavic charm, Baryshnikov's painter is just another power boyfriend like the rich playboy portrayed in earlier seasons by Chris Noth, a Mr. Bolshoi (though seeing the former dancer leap over trash bins to flag down a speeding taxi in Part 1 was quite thrilling).

When Sex and the City concludes in February, fans will undoubtedly miss its feminism and frilly femininity, the unabashed wallowing in womanly preoccupations: sexual fulfillment, spa treatments, masculine frailty, designer clothes, diet tips, bikini waxes, cell-phone etiquette, proper party attire and Manolo Blahnik shoe sales.

In its stead they will have to turn to David's unabashed wallowing in male neurosis: hypochondria, traffic slights, lingering house guests, baldness, valet parking attendants and golf tips. It is a credit to David's comic gift that his narrow, egomaniacal milieu turns out to have universal appeal.