Before the final season of Curb Your Enthusiasm premiered this winter, I asked Larry David via email if he had taken any lessons from Seinfeld’s famously divisive finale. His reply was simple: “I learned that disappointing people en masse can be very enjoyable.”
Obviously, David was joking. But maybe he kind of wasn’t. Throughout Curb’s 12th and last season, it was clear that David and executive producer Jeff Schaffer were setting up a cheeky redo of Seinfeld’s conclusion—in which Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer accidentally break a silly Good Samaritan law, then find themselves roped into a trial in which memorable characters from the series’ past reemerge to testify about what terrible people the sitcom’s main characters are. The series ends with the foursome being sentenced to actual jail time; its anticlimactic final moments see Jerry Seinfeld and Jason Alexander repeating a trivial conversation they’d had in Seinfeld’s pilot.
In Curb’s case, the broken law is slightly more meaningful: Larry is arrested in the season’s premiere episode for handing a bottle of water to a woman waiting in line to vote in Atlanta, which is somehow an actual crime in the state of Georgia. Alongside detours about dating Sienna Miller and hitting Troy Kotsur with a golf ball, the season follows Larry as he bumbles into a completely avoidable trial, which finally begins in the series finale.
Just like the Seinfeld crew, Larry finds himself staring down a host of Curb guest stars as they rave about the horrible things he’s done over the course of the series: killing a black swan, peeing on a portrait of Jesus Christ, stealing multiple objects from multiple dead people, yada yada yada. The outcome seems predetermined: Larry is, in fact, found guilty. It appears that he was certain to close the show behind bars, just as Jerry and co. once did.
Except Curb had one final curveball in store. The episode winds to a close with Larry in a cell, starting a silly conversation about pants with a fellow inmate—when suddenly, Jerry Seinfeld himself enters and tells his onetime collaborator that Larry is actually free to go.
Why? Because Seinfeld, who was in town to support Larry during his ordeal, spotted a juror from Larry’s trial out and about in Atlanta when all members of the jury were supposed to be sequestered. After a classic Jerry-and-George-style back-and-forth (“He broke a sequester?!” “Broke a sequester!”), the Seinfeld star tells David that a mistrial has been declared, and his sentence has been thrown out.
“You don’t want to end up like this. Nobody wants to see it,” Seinfeld says slyly just before Larry leaves his cell for the last time. “Trust me.”
And so the two leave the jail, though not before David throws up his hands and turns to Seinfeld. “Oh, my God,” he says. “This is how we should have ended the finale.” For the record, Seinfeld—or his onscreen alter ego, at least—agrees.