Curb: California Split

Spoilers for the latest "Curb Your Enthusiasm" coming up just as soon as I set Season Passes for all of my wife's favorite shows...

Art imitating life or an amazing coincidence? Ordinarily, I hate learning and writing about the personal lives of celebrities, but given how much of this show either spins out of things that happened to Larry or things he wishes had happened, it's hard not to look at the break-up of his on-screen marriage without wondering about the parallels to the real one. Larry and Laurie have said it's an amicable split, but was a faulty TiVo involved in any way? Or did Laurie find out that Larry was writing a separation into the show and start getting ideas? For what it's worth, the real-life Davids announced their split in July, which was several months after "Curb" wrapped production for the season.

Okay, that aside, "The TiVo Guy," while not great, was still a significant improvement over the last batch of episodes. Cheryl coming to her senses and dumping Larry was a long time coming, and there's a lot of fun to be had with the premise. I loved Larry trying to justify his value to Cheryl with the omnipresent tissues/mints/pen supply, and him asking Cheryl -- who for a moment seemed willing to listen sympathetically to him -- corroborate his story for the skeptical hostess, and I really loved how quickly Funkhouser caved on his loudly declared intention to side with Larry in all of this.

More importantly, the new status quo (however temporary) allows Larry to date. I know people weren't crazy about the Mel Brooks arc from season four, but I loved the parallel arc with Larry repeatedly failing in his attempt to fulfill Cheryl's promise to let him have sex outside the marriage before their 10th anniversary. (Interesting that Gina Gershon, who played one of those failed conquests, wasn't in this episode, even though Larry's single and he stopped by her dry cleaning establishment twice.) The very married in real life Lucy Lawless was a good sport as Larry's first date; I look forward to him humiliating himself many times over with the opposite sex.

Oddly, though, my favorite part of the episode had nothing whatsoever to do with the split, or with anything else: Larry showing up the D-bag with the Bluetooth by having an equally loud conversation with himself. In an episode in which he was wrong on so many, many things, Larry could not have been righter in that moment.

What did everybody else think?