The Winter Olympics are only held every four years, but that's probably still too rigid a schedule for someone like Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David, a character who cascades through life at his own pace. Ahead of Curb Your Enthusiasm's first seasonal DVD release in 6 years -- Season 9 comes out on Tuesday, March 6 -- CinemaBlend spoke with showrunner Jeff Schaffer about both the latest and the upcoming season, and I asked where he thought the fictional Larry might excel at the Winter Olympics. Unsurprisingly, Schaffer's answer was hilarious and so very Larry.
I can definitely see Larry curling. [laughs] Or at least announcing curling. Wondering why it exists, and why there's a sport with two grown men brooming. 'Go back to sweeping with a broom.' I mean the real thing, to me, that he would probably be doing is saying what I think, which is [in] a lot of these Olympic sports, the difference between first place and ninth place is like 0.004 seconds. The real winner in this is the Omega timepiece. That's the star of the show is the clock. So they need more events where the star of the show is not the clock.
There isn't all that much that separates the real Larry David's headspace from TV Larry's headspace, though the fictional version is much more actively eager to share that headspace with everyone around him. (Often with vindictive intentions.) And so everything Jeff Schaffer proposed sounds pretty...pretty...pretty good to me.
Larry's not the most athletic guy, at least in a Winter Olympics sense of the word, so it's not surprising that he might be best in curling, an event where skill and precision are utilized over brute strength and other physical attributes. Plus, everybody likes to use curling as a punchline these days. But wait, on second thought, Larry probably wouldn't be competing in the event, because how in the world?
No, Larry would be better suited doing some announcing during the Winter Olympics. And it would make all the sense in the world if the (fictional) International Olympic Committee and (fictional) NBC decided to bring in Larry David to offer some cantankerous counter-analysis for the network's more charm-oozing analysts, perhaps as a replacement. After all, David's Seinfeld was one of NBC's biggest hits of all time. Thus, if everyone made the grand efforts to get Larry out to PyeongChang to share his views about the global event, it would take less than a second for him to rain criticisms down on the Games' more head-scratching elements.
If taking down a sport itself is too small-scale, Larry could easily then up the ante by partially dismissing the skill and training of hundreds of international athletes in order to put all the glory on the inanimate timepiece. Not that Jeff Schaffer was doing that, as he was commenting more on the abundance of time-based competition, but we're talking about Larry here, and Larry couldn't possibly have the entire globe listening in without doing everything possible to alienate everyone. That'd be a hell of a way to end the series, if nothing else.
While we're hoping Season 10 will arrive on HBO by the end of the year, Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Ninth Season will hit retailers on DVD on Tuesday, March 6. Season 9 is also currently available for digital download purchase, though we're betting the special features will be worth the wait.
For those who need some laughs in the meantime, head to our midseason premiere schedule to see everything that's coming to the small screen in the coming months.
