The Pitch: Twenty-one years in, and LA’s (least) favorite curmudgeon Larry David is still up to his usual self-serving tricks, even as HBO’s long-running sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm moves from its MAGA-hat commentary in Season 10 to COVID-era shenanigans in Season 11. The season premiere — dubbed “The Five-Foot Fence,” Jehovah bless — brings the show back without skipping a beat, rolling into these so-called “unprecedented times” with all the unpredictable hilarity we’ve come to expect from L.D. and the crew.
Leave it to Larry to start off the season with an image right out of Sunset Boulevard: a dead body in Larry’s pool and the police determine that it’s clearly a burglar who fell in and drowned. No harm, no foul, thinks Larry; by the time he’s successfully pitched a show about his young life as a chauffeur (called “Young Larry”) to Netflix, he’s forgotten all about it.
You’d think that’d be the end of it, but in classic Curb form, this red herring turns into what will likely be one of the season’s overarching plotlines. You see, the burglar wouldn’t have drowned if Larry had followed an obscure Orange County code that requires a fence around his pool, which opens him up to legal troubles. And lo, the burglar’s brother, smelling extortion in the air, suggests a deal: cast his awkward, plus-sized Latina daughter (Keyla Monterroso Mejia) as the rail-thin, Jewish character of Marsha Lifshitz in his new sitcom, or he sues Larry and brings him up on criminal charges. Sensing no other choice, Larry agrees.
