{"id":727148,"date":"2026-06-26T12:06:11","date_gmt":"2026-06-26T12:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/727148\/"},"modified":"2026-06-26T12:06:11","modified_gmt":"2026-06-26T12:06:11","slug":"larry-david-and-barack-obamas-new-hbo-show-is-a-departure-for-both","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/727148\/","title":{"rendered":"Larry David and Barack Obama\u2019s new HBO show is a departure for both."},"content":{"rendered":"

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Larry David famously built\u00a0Seinfeld\u00a0around the mantra \u201cNo hugging, no learning.\u201d There would be no moral lessons at the close of each episode, no slowly building love story, none of what the entertainment industry likes to call \u201cheart.\u201d The show\u2019s narcissistic Manhattanites would not grow or change in any way, except perhaps to become more like themselves\u2014a kind of existential stubbornness they shared with the protagonist of\u00a0Curb Your Enthusiasm<\/a>, a fictionalized version of David played by the man himself. But while David\u2019s characters never changed, the world around them did, and as\u00a0Curb\u00a0stretched from the tail end of the Clinton era into the beginning of Trump, the anti-sentimentality that initially seemed so bracing started to feel like an ominous harbinger of the red-tinted \u201cFuck your feelings\u201d era, a time when discarding the social contract went from being a secret shame to a proud performance. Suddenly, we lived in a world of Larry Davids, insisting everyone else play by their rules and yet beholden to none.<\/p>\n

David made clear on\u00a0Curb\u00a0that\u00a0neither he nor his on-screen avatar had any fondness for MAGA<\/a>, and it was canon from the beginning that, far from being an incipient right-winger, TV-Larry was practically the archetype of the self-satisfied L.A. liberal. (In an early episode, he gets incensed that other Prius drivers won\u2019t ratify the smug superiority he gets from driving around town in an electric car.) But the show\u2019s universe had no way to accommodate sincerity, so the closest it could get to a clean break was insisting that Larry wasn\u2019t\u00a0that\u00a0kind of a jerk.<\/p>\n

David\u2019s new series,\u00a0Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, premiering Friday evening on HBO, is a more dramatic departure, in that its \u201calmost history of America\u201d plays out as a series of disconnected sketches roughly spanning the first 200 years of the United States. But its central conceit is that, even at the republic\u2019s proudest moments, there have always been what Barack Obama, who provides the intro to the series and serves as one of its executive producers, calls \u201cdeeply unpleasant people who stood in the way of progress.\u201d In other words, Larrys. At the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, he\u2019s the Founding Father who wants to load up the document with a list of his personal grievances: We hold these truths to be self-evident, that no one should be forced to share an umbrella, and if you\u2019re invited to a dinner party, you have a legal right to ask who you\u2019re seated next to.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, David\u2019s character thwarts the march of history simply by being himself. When Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat next to his garrulous Alabaman in the white section of a city bus, he defends her right to do so, or at least his right not to have to get up and risk someone else forcing him to move down a spot. But sitting next to an old white man with no filter or self-awareness turns out not to be quite the milestone Rosa was hoping to achieve, so she eventually joins her friends in the back and resolves to try again another day. Sometimes, the historical breakthrough goes as planned, but its future downsides emerge at the same instant: David\u2019s Alexander Graham Bell invents the telephone and immediately discovers the friend who has nothing to say but won\u2019t get off the line; the Wright brothers realize the dream of airplane flight, and also the discomfort of getting stuck in a middle seat.<\/p>\n

Although\u00a0Life, Larry\u2019s \u201calmost history\u201d mostly cuts off around Watergate, there are times in its seven-episode run when it pulls back the curtain and makes direct reference to the present. HBO has asked critics not to spoil one such sketch, despite the fact that, as the closer to the episode that premieres next week a few hours before the nation\u2019s 250th\u00a0birthday, it serves as something of a mission statement for the show. (The implicit reason is to protect the identity of the guest star playing a certain former president, although the pointed criticism of the office\u2019s present occupant may also have something to do with it.) But I can tell you that Jonas Salk\u2019s leather-skinned neighbor, the one with a voice like a blender full of rocks and extremely unscientific opinions about vaccines, bears an awfully close resemblance to the current husband of\u00a0David\u2019s former\u00a0Curb co-star<\/a>, and that\u2019s before David cuts off his ranting with a name drop that all but seals it.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

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In Obama\u2019s mock-serious preamble, he describes the U.S. as a bold experiment in self-governance, one where \u201cpower resides not with a monarch but with ordinary citizens.\u201d But the series plays out, over and over again, the most treacherous variable in that experiment: namely, the people. (At the time he makes that statement, Obama is standing in a museum the people\u2019s duly elected leader has said\u00a0focuses too much on the downside of slavery<\/a>; he may stop short of underlining how others have betrayed the promise of the nation\u2019s ideals, but he\u2019s happy to act as the straight man while someone else does it.) It\u2019s essentially a one-joke show, although some variations, like the suggestion that the Civil War was started by a dispute over passed appetizers, are more inspired than others. And, apart from jabbing the occasional finger in the White House\u2019s eye, David and his co-creator Jeff Schaffer largely avoid the calculated provocation of\u00a0Curb\u2019s cringe comedy\u2014there are handful of sketches set during slavery, but never a joke\u00a0about\u00a0slavery. You know who the good and the bad guys are, and who you\u2019re meant to be rooting for, even if the answer is frequently no one.<\/p>\n

In other words, it all feels a little safe. If David isn\u2019t quite apologizing for loosing his self-interested monsters upon the world, he seems intent on making sure we know we\u2019re supposed to be laughing\u00a0at\u00a0and not\u00a0with\u00a0them. Still no hugging, but perhaps a little learning?<\/p>\n

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