Life, Larry and thePursuit of Unhappiness

Put Larry David inside the Lincoln assassination. Put him on the Lewis and Clark expedition, next to Jerry Seinfeld. Put him in Times Square on the day the war ends, standing right beside the most famous kiss in American history, complaining. That is the whole show, it is a brilliant idea, and Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness proves it completely in its first episode and then spends six more episodes not quite proving it again.

This is Larry David's first project since Curb Your Enthusiasm ended in 2024, made with Jeff Schaffer, who directs, and produced by Barack and Michelle Obama's company. Seven episodes, four sketches each, improvised from outlines the same way Curb always was.

The first episode is close to perfect

The opening episode is the best half hour of comedy HBO has aired this year. It knows exactly what the joke is. History is full of people behaving with enormous dignity, and Larry David is a man who has never once in his life been able to let something go.

Susie Essman as Susan B. Anthony is inspired casting. Bill Hader and Kathryn Hahn as the Lincolns are genuinely funny. When the show is working, the laugh comes from the gap between how seriously everyone else is taking the moment and how completely Larry cannot.

Then the format starts working against him

Here is the problem, and it took me a few episodes to see it. Larry David's comedy has always needed consequences. On Curb, he did something small and rude in episode one and it came back to destroy him by episode ten. The comedy was in the build. The pain was cumulative.

Sketches do not do that. Each one starts fresh, runs eight minutes, and ends. Larry annoys somebody, the sketch stops, and nothing follows him into the next one. You get the setup every time and almost never the payoff, and by the middle of the season you can feel the show reaching the punchline early because it has nowhere else to go.

A lot of the sketches land on the same beat too. Larry says the inappropriate thing, the historical figure is offended, everyone stares. That works beautifully the first four times. It does not survive twenty eight.

The hits and the misses

Would I watch another season

Yes, without hesitating, and that is why this is not a bad review. The idea is too good to abandon after one attempt. The show has already proved it can hit, and the problems here are structural rather than creative.

A second season needs two changes. Fewer sketches, longer ones, so a scene has room to build the way a Curb episode builds. And some kind of thread running through an episode so that what Larry does in the first sketch costs him something in the last one. Give this show consequences and it becomes very good very quickly.