Curb Your Enthusiasm - Season 2

The second season of Larry David's highly self-referential, mostly-improvised, foul-mouthed, comedic television program is as consistently funny as the first. Most episodes end with something bad that's been set up by earlier events happening without much real closure, and a couple of them in this block of episodes aren't that funny or well-executed. But in general, I'd say it's overall a little higher quality than the first run, thanks to the increased elaborateness of the trouble Larry gets in. The first time around it was mostly a funny but often disjointed sequence of unfortunate events, while everything seems better tied together here.

A big part of it is the introduction of an actual story arc that runs through the whole season. While the ideas in the first year could be seen in almost any order, they established a bigger focus on continuity this time that runs up through the most recent episode. The story in this season is Larry's quest to pitch a new show, first with Jason Alexander and then with Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and how he manages to screw up every opportunity he gets. The real cleverness comes from how the idea for the show completely mirrors what's actually happening in the show, in a similar way to Jerry and George's idea for a show in Seinfeld. There's a lot of little stabs at HBO and things like that, and I really enjoyed the meta-humor along with the crazy situations and plentiful shouting that carried over from the first season.