NO LESSONS LEARNED

Pretty, pretty, pretty hard to resist.

Life Be Not Proud. Going Backwards. Something So Wrong. These are some of the titles that were suggested for the TV series that Larry David was developing in the late 1990s. When the names were put up for a vote among friends, no one chose the title David suggested. No matter. It was his show, and he went ahead with his name: Curb Your Enthusiasm. Good thing, that. It’s difficult to imagine a sitcom named Something So Wrong lasting 12 seasons—120 episodes in all—over 24 years. This is one of the many nuggets that readers will glean from this authorized coffee-table celebration of what has to be one of the funniest-ever TV shows—unless you have a problem with cringe comedy that focuses on the everyday neuroses of a self-centered, pampered, and misanthropic actor named Larry David. In the show’s early days—it premiered in 1999—HBO had no way of knowing that David, even post-Seinfeld, had a hit on his hands. In this as-told-to companion book, written by Los Angeles Times news and culture critic Ali, Susie Essman recalls David offering her a role over the phone without an audition. Essman: “I said, ‘Send me a script.’ He said, ‘There’s no script, and there’s no money. It’s low-budget. You’re going to have to fly yourself out and put yourself up.’” One can only imagine how Essman’s character—the gloriously in-your-face and profane Susie Greene, wife of David’s agent, Jeff Greene (Jeff Garlin)—would have replied to such a paltry offer. The book gets into David’s Brooklyn roots—his parents hoped he’d be a mailman (“That was their best-case scenario”)—and it explores the show’s famously improvised scenes. “It felt fresh,” Ali writes. “No canned jokes. No scripted pauses for laughs.” In addition to the many interviews—not all of them especially insightful—the book includes a bounty of images, a map of locations, and a useful episode guide.

This exuberant collection won’t have you curbing your enthusiasm about a great show.