When this season of Curb Your Enthusiasm started and began its storyline involving Larry starring in The Producers on Broadway, I was a bit disappointed. The ensuing episodes which included The Producers storyline were never as good as the ones that left it unmentioned completely or as something simply going on in the background. Personally, I found three of the last four episodes leading-up to tonight’s finale the funniest of the season. “The Car-Pool Lane” finds Larry picking-up a hooker so he can drive in the carpool lane on the way to Dodger Stadium; “Wandering Bear” which finds Larry consulting his Native American gardner to help cure his wife’s numb vagina, a result of his putting on an “all-night” condom inside-out; and in “The Survivor”, Larry almost finally collects on his 10th anniversary gift from Cheryl when Gina Gershon guest stars as the sexiest Hasidic Jew ever who also happens to want to get into Larry’s pants. All three of these stuck The Producers plotline into the deep background.
That’s why I was nervous going into tonight’s season finale “Opening Night,” which would obviously wrap-up the season-long arc. But then the show reminded me why it truly is one of, if not the, best comedies on television. Maybe I was blind and alone on this one, but I was unable to predict the ultimately inevitable denouement. When Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft start celebrating the demise of The Producers, toasting the failure of their most successful albatross, mimicking the crucial sequence form the actual show, it all came together for me, and the purpose of this entire subplot — an entire season all for one joke — made sense, and more importantly, it worked.
In fact, it helped reinforce exactly how well-written this show is. Yeah, I know that it’s not really scripted, and every scene is improvised by the actors based on nothing more than David’s outline, but the reason the show works as well as it does is because of how well and intricately that outline is plotted. David obviously lookes ahead at the entire season, making sure that the important elements for an overall arc are there. This is sadly lacking in most television. Even David Chase has often been criticized for leaving too many dangling threads at the end of a season of The Sopranos. But the biggest culprit at poor plot-arc planning in my eyes is Fox’s 24.
24 has had its place as one of my favorite and most frustrating shows since it premiered. I gave it some slack it’s first season, was less satisfied during its second, and have been completely annoyed by the current version. The writers have been quoted as saying they know where they want to start and where they want to end up, but they fill in the middle as they go along. Any writer will tell you that the middle is always the hardest part, and 24 has managed to survive two seasons that if examined closely completely lack consistency and on more than one level make no sense. Yet this season has been relatively boring, utterly ridiculous and completely derivative of what has come before. To make matters worse, a couple weeks ago, they finally killed off one of the series’ main recurring villains, Nina Myers. At least, we can hope that they’ve finally killed-off Nina, since in the end she was like some kind of monster at the end of a horror movie who kept coming back to life. Sliced artery, blood spurting all over the place? No problem for Nina. As long as they can stitch her up while she stops the anestesia from actually flowing, she shouldn’t have any problem killing a room full of people and escaping, right? What 24 needs to do — and has always need to do — is have an entire season written ahead of time. They should be writing next seasons’ shows NOW. They should not take the spring/summer hiatus off. Rather, the writers can take their hiatus in November-February because once they’ve started shooting anything, the whole thing should be plotted out and written alreadyl checked and verified that everything makes sense. I’m not talking about things being unrealistic in a 24-hour world. I can suspend my disbelief as much if not more than the next guy. But when I don’t believe something within the reality the writers create for me, we’ve got a problem.
Whew … I’m glad I got that out.
Out of Focus 