Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 3 [DVD] [2005]

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The third season of HBO's comedy sensation offers more of the same. "Not that there's anything wrong with that," to quote Larry David's other television series, a certain little sitcom called Seinfeld. Consequently, Curb Your Enthusiasm's junior year means more Larry (Larry David) and more of his hilariously embarrassing mishaps. It also means more of his patient spouse Cheryl (Cheryl Hines), avuncular manager Jeff (Jeff Garlin), Jeff’s foul-mouthed wife Susie (Susie Essman), and assorted celebrity pals, including Richard Lewis, Ted Danson, Wanda Sykes, Paul Reiser, and Martin Short, all playing themselves (or, like Larry, versions thereof). The theme that (loosely) ties these 10 episodes together is Larry's involvement in upscale eatery Bobo's, in which Danson and Michael York (yes, that Michael York) are co-investors. As expected, the restaurant will serve to complicate Larry's life in every conceivable way--and vice versa. But the funniest (and most profane) episode must surely be "Krazee-Eyez Killa," starring Chris Williams (Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story) as the fidelity-impaired gangster rapper to whom Wanda has become engaged. This riotous installment, which sends up Jewish, Italian, and African American gangsters alike, won an Emmy for Robert B. Weide's direction and features that old master-of-direction himself, Martin Scorsese, who first appeared in "The Special Section" (in which Larry bribes a gravedigger to relocate his mother’s gravesite). It's also the episode in which Larry gets a hair stuck in his throat. That hair, which once belonged to someone rather close to him, will remain lodged there for the next several episodes, until a "divine intervention" in "Mary, Joseph and Larry" dislodges it once and for all--along with the last of Larry's dignity. --Kathleen C. Fennessy