Curb your enthusiasm: Will there be a season 13 of the Larry David show?

With No Lessons Learned, the tenth and final episode of Season 12, Curb Your Enthusiasm reached the end of the road after a decent run on HBO and 51 Emmy nominations (as the protagonist wryly points out: “Yeah, it won two!”).

End of an era

The sitcom, which first aired in October 2000, almost made it to a quarter of a century. In Curb’s final outing, Larry David returned to Atlanta to stand trial for violating local laws (giving Auntie Rae a bottle of water while she was queuing to vote). He’s found guilty and given a year behind bars. Co-star Susie Essman seethes, “You’re small, you’re petty, you’re jealous… Everybody hates you. You’re a walking f**king virus Larry!”

David explained to MSNBC at the start of the year that the sitcom had run its course. “I saw myself at the screening of the first episode, it was a huge screen and I thought: ‘Oh my God, this guy should be in a nursing home’ I couldn’t believe it. I mean, people have to watch this!? No, that’s it!”.

“The character for me is an alter ego really. That character is doing everything I want to do in my life. So he’s my hero, that guy - I love that guy. And I love being yelled and cursed at,” he added.

Of course, there have been attempts to draw a line under the show in the past. In 2005, Larry ended up dying and going to heaven, but even there he managed to get under someone’s skin. After getting into a disagreement with his guardian angels (played by Dustin Hoffman and Sacha Baron Cohen), his soul re-enters his body and he is sent back to Earth, prompting a fifth season to be commissioned the following year.

As always, there has been plenty of speculation about whether this actually is the end of Curb or whether David will have a change of heart and start working on episode 13. David will turn 77 in July and summed up the whole of the last series with an adroit one-liner: “I’m 76 years old, and I have never learned a lesson in my entire life!” before adding, “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”.

While some have their doubts that this is the end for Curb, Larry at least got to end it on his own terms. And when it was pointed out to him that he had called it quits at least a couple of times in the past only to return, he replied, “Yeah, I said it before - but I wasn’t 76 when I said it…”