Curb Your Enthusiasm - Season 4

Another year provided another ten episodes of one of the funnier shows on television. I don't think the fourth was quite as strong as the last couple perhaps were, but it was a lot of fun just the same. The fictionalized version of Larry David is a really interesting character because of the conflicted feelings he brings up. He's a good person at heart and usually just has terrible luck in social situations, but you often get annoyed by his refusal to play by society's rules and just accept what's happened. At the same time, the people who's deals with, despite usually being "right" in the social sense, are also usually jerks who make a bigger deal out of things than necessary. Almost everything that happens is a real misunderstanding that turns into an absurdly huge mess, and part of the humor is just the semi-believability of his predicaments.

The two main pieces of the fourth season's plot are Larry being selected by Mel Brooks to play the lead in The Producers on Broadway despite him not even being a real actor, and his wife Cheryl giving him a chance to sleep with another woman for his tenth anniversary gift. As can be expected, he gets very close to achieving the latter multiple times before blowing it at the last second (sometimes his fault, sometimes not). The former comes to a head in the excellent season finale which includes lots of tipping problems, a run-in with Stephen Colbert, and a plot twist filled with plenty of meta-humor. It's pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty good.