‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’ Boss Can Finally Talk About That ‘Seinfeld’ Ending

[This story contains major spoilers from the series finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm, “No Lessons Learned.”]

Curb Your Enthusiasm‘s ending was long in the making.

After 12 seasons and more than 20 years, Larry David’s HBO comedy gem signed off on Sunday night with a classic callback to the Seinfeld series finale, which aired in 1998. And the overall reception so far brings to mind a familiar Larry phrase: It was a pretty, pretty good way to wrap.

Even David — the star and creator of the series that sees him playing a loosely fictionalized version of himself — was happy after the screen cut to black, his longtime collaborator, executive producer Jeff Schaffer tells The Hollywood Reporter.

Speaking the morning after the top-secret series finale was unleashed onto the Curb audience, Schaffer and star Susie Essman (who plays the indefatigable Susie Greene) can finally speak freely about the genesis of Curb‘s ending, how long the idea to rewrite the Seinfeld finale had been in the works and how this puts a “stubborn exclamation point” on all of David’s work to finally tell his naysayers that yes, this show is really, really ending.

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You kept the secret. How does it feel? And, do you feel you stuck the landing?

SUSIE ESSMAN I had not seen it until last night. I’d seen all the episodes except the finale, and I couldn’t be happier. I thought it was such an amazing ending. Just perfect. It wrapped up the whole series in a beautiful way.

JEFF SCHAFFER I’m so happy to not have to be evasive about how we’re ending the season and the series. I feel like I’ve had this deep, dark family secret that I’ve been carrying around for a year and a half now. But, it feels great. On the show, half the time people are watching through closed eyes, going like, “Oh my God, Larry is going to engage,” or, “Larry is going to turn back around and reengage.” And you can’t believe he’s doing it. I feel like this season was that writ large.

It was like, “Wait. They’re not really going to do that, really? They’re not really going to do the Seinfeld finale. I can’t believe they’re doing it!” And then we subvert it in the end, I thought in a perfect way. I was very happy, because in the end, it was a perfect Larry David ending.

You were not fully honest with me about Seinfeld earlier in the season when we talked about the echoes! Larry spoke to Willie Geist (who guest starred on the final season) this morning about how he was getting too old to play this character, which prompted the show ending. How much of it was Larry saying it was time, and how much of it was realizing that playing this Seinfeld card was the true ending-ending?

SCHAFFER Way back in July of ‘22 we were writing the season and we were talking about this. It was a joke scene with Larry: A kid throws a ball or kicks Larry and he has to get involved in this lesson, and he doesn’t want to be involved in this lesson: “I don’t have time for your lesson, I don’t need a lesson. I’m 76 years old, I’ve never learned a lesson in my life.” And when he said that we were like, “Hey, hold on. We always joke about you never learning a lesson. What if we just turn that into the meta joke of the entire finale?” [The series finale is titled “No Lessons Learned.”]

Because a trial was a possible ending. We weren’t sure what we were going to do for an ending, but that was a possibility. And once we realized we could do this meta joke of Larry never learning a lesson — and oh by the way, he’s going to steer the Titanic right back into that [Seinfeld] iceberg — that’s when we knew that was the end of the season and that’s when we knew that was the end of the series. From that point on, everything was just figuring out how to seed things in. How much and how little we wanted to. But from that moment on, we knew that had to be the end of the series, because that was the funniest end of the series.

ESSMAN I have a question, Jeff. So then you went back and peppered in the little lines about the Seinfeld ending, like Ted [Danson] making that comment to Larry [about him returning to write the series finale and judging him over it]? You went back and then added those in, right?

SCHAFFER Yes, some of those hadn’t even been written yet. Then we started to slide those things in and it was like, “Oh, of course, Leon [JB Smoove] never would have seen Seinfeld” and we can talk about that and get him involved in this sort of meta navel-gazing.

ESSMAN That’s the genius of these two together, Jeff and Larry, and how they figure these things out. I read all the outlines before we begin, so I knew what the whole storyline was and what the ending was going to be, and I was there as we were shooting it, of course. But to see it all put together is a whole other thing.

SCHAFFER I’m happy with how it happened and how it came out. It was such a silly thing, but it was sort of ambitious in its laziness, progressive in its intransigence and unique in its repetition. We got to swing and miss on purpose, and then hit it out of the park.

Larry has clearly had feelings about the Seinfeld ending for years and years, and everyone has made their feelings known. But here it is circling back in an epic way to give you the ending to this show. So, it was pretty worth it?

SCHAFFER Ultimately, this ending was about more than the show. It spoke to the contrary DNA of Larry, and it sort of spans his entire career and makes it a fitting end to the series and puts a stubborn exclamation point on all of its work. That’s the other thing I liked about it. It spoke about not just the series but about the creator of the series.

It does feel like a stubborn exclamation point, one you can’t revisit and open back up. Do you feel it’s too perfect and to ever revisit Curb? How final does this feel?

ESSMAN I think it’s final. It feels final to me, but in a positive way. We’ve done 12 seasons, we’ve done this for 24 years. It’s been amazing, it’s been the greatest professional experience of my life and I think of everyone who has been on the show and, it’s over. And it’s over in a great way and we can celebrate it. I got so many texts last night, “This must be bittersweet.” It’s really not that bittersweet. It’s over and that’s a positive thing, to have been part of this creation for all this time. Nothing can last forever — we’re all getting old!

SCHAFFER We made sure when we were doing this that it didn’t end in the jail. It didn’t end with Larry and Jerry tying up the career stuff. We wanted to end with all of our cast. We end with them how we began with them: like the alpha and omega of bickering. I previously told you, Jackie, a few times — there were scenes that we have shot before that we’re actually using in this season. I couldn’t tell you this at the time, but the final scene of the series, we’ve shot twice before. We shot it once in season nine and again in season 11 on the way to Mexico: Susie opened the shade and got into a fight with Larry on the plane. And each time it was like an extra joke in a scene that was already jam-packed and, how long can we stay on a plane? So we cut the scenes. Now, we have this scene that we shot twice, cut out of the show twice, and it became the perfect way to say goodbye to all of our guys.

You also spoke about scenes you reshot after returning from the strikes. What were those scenes?

ESSMAN The scenes in the reshoots were me in the wheelchair in the courtroom, and a couple of the courtroom things.

SCHAFFER It was also really important that, if we’re going to put everyone in court, we wanted it to be a Curb episode with Curb stories. So, wanting to figure out what that salad dressing is and Leon talking about sympathy. And it all comes together in court where Susie gets to do this amazing wheelchair performance; Larry and Susie get to team up and then it all goes to shit, culminating in an Auntie Rae [Ellia English] scream for the ages and a sentence that I don’t think has ever been said on planet Earth.  

ESSMAN She’s fantastic. And, I don’t know if I’m correct about this Jeff, because I never asked you or Larry, but it felt like to me when I read the final episode, a year and a half ago, that you guys gave each of us something special in that last episode, as a gift to each of us.

SCHAFFER We wanted to make sure everyone had their story, had their moment. It wouldn’t have felt right to have a final episode where you didn’t get to see all of our brilliant stars shine.

So when Jeff Garlin talked about you, Jeff, calling cut after the final scene and he began weeping, that was the plane scene?

ESSMAN Yes, that was the last thing we shot in the final season.

SCHAFFER I remember when Jackie [Schaffer, his wife] and I were in the final season of The League, we were talking to Matthew Weiner about the finale of Mad Men and he said one of his big regrets was that the final shooting scene of Mad Men didn’t have all the cast together. Jon [Hamm] was in California and this and that. So we we really remembered that. It was very important here that the final day, whatever it was, had all of our cast together to celebrate an amazing accomplishment.

ESSMAN It’s the family. It’s an ensemble. It’s Larry’s show, but we’re his show family. And especially when you’re improvising, you really have to have tremendous trust and respect for each other.

When you took this idea to Jerry Seinfeld, was it an easy yes or did it take convincing?

SCHAFFER Larry called Jerry and he goes, “I’m in.” And by the way, Jerry was so excited when we were doing it. When we finished shooting that jail scene, he was so jazzed about it and he said, “This is amazing. This is a joke that is 26 years in the making.” He was excited about what this was doing, too. I’m just glad we all stayed in showbiz long enough to actually pull this off.

Now we understand that comment Jerry Seinfeld had made in the press — where he said he and Larry were up to something about Seinfeld, and Jason Alexander said he didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. Were you freaking out when that happened, or was it all stirring the pot?

ESSMAN And, he didn’t know!

SCHAFFER I knew where it was coming from, which was that he was very excited. And that made me happy, that he was excited about this. It was great to see Larry and Jerry in a scene together shooting the shit, it was like watching Seinfeld Adam and Eve just fucking around in the Comedy Garden of Eden. It’s like, “Oh, this is how Seinfeld got made, you guys chatting about nothing. About bearded ladies.”

One thing I want to say about our cast is that this is an improv show and it’s so hard to do stories and be funny. What they do is a level of difficulty that is just incredible. I have the utmost respect for it. With other things they are scripted; you say the stuff. The stuff that we got in this episode alone from this master class of comedians, it made it a really, really funny show. Not just a finale show, but a funny show.

You’ve talked about the life cycle of Curb, how you always feel you guys are done after a season. But now we know that the door is more shut than you let on. Firstly, in Curb world, where do you see Larry going from here in his future? And secondly, we have Susie and Leon and lots of people you could spin off. Is there anything being seriously considered for branching off and continuing this universe?

ESSMAN Not that I know of. I wouldn’t worry about Larry. His imagination is so fertile. He’s not one to just sit around and play golf and watch the Yankees. He’ll do that, too, but there’s a brain there that doesn’t stop. And same with Schaffer. There will be great things from this young man over here, Jeff Schaffer!

SCHAFFER When we knew this was going to be the final season and this was going to be the final episode, I said, “Look, there’s going to be a lot of press about this. There’s going to be a lot of hoopla. But there’s nothing more Larry David than taking a final victory lap and then slinking back.”

So that’s your final answer, Jeff?

SCHAFFER Today!

ESSMAN As I’ve said before, none of us actually die in the end. (Laughs.)

SCHAFFER Yeah, that plane didn’t go down! It landed back in L.A. and they got on with their lives. Susie had another dinner party and for some unbeknownst reason, she invited Larry again.

ESSMAN Again!

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Curb Your Enthusiasm is now streaming on Max.