The show is an only slightly fictionalized version of Mr. David’s real life in Los Angeles. Most of the dialogue is improvised, adding a cinéma vérité flavor to the show.
As on “Seinfeld,” the NBC show Mr. David created with Jerry Seinfeld in 1990, Larry and his sidekicks are mostly idle, self-absorbed and argumentative. But this show is even more uncensored, veined with the pessimism, loony narcissism and political incorrectness that are at the core of Mr. David’s comedy…
Mr. David, 55, a former stand-up comic best known for lashing out at inattentive audiences, is now the critics’ darling, an auteur whose creativity has not yet reached its peak.
His comedy is stripped of all sentimentality, which is part of its subversive appeal. When Larry’s mother is dying, his father does not inform him, saying his mother didn’t want to “bother” him while he was shooting a film in New York with Mr. Scorsese. He is shocked, but quickly realizes he can use his mother’s death as an excuse to avoid bores, cancel a dinner party and persuade his wife to have sex. NY Times
The article suggests that Larry David’s growing popularity may be a coattails phenomenon, as the show follows The Sopranos in HBO’s Sunday evening schedule. I’ve seen this thing a few times and, interestingly, I think it shares something with the latter beyond a timeslot. While most of the critics writing about the attraction of The Sopranos take the obligatory moral stand at the outset that, of course, they don’t find the characters appealing, I think that the more complicated challenge of watching this show is that, for some (or many), Tony Soprano at least is a sympathetic character. [There; I’ve said it. — FmH] One can even relate to his venality. The viewer ‘s dissonant experience of principled abhorrence clashing with likeability makes for interesting viewing, and I have had a similar experience in finding Larry David appealingly, preposterously hilarious while his preoccupations and lifestyle empty and morally vacuous. I wouldn’t take the parallels too far (in case you want to quibble with me), but it struck me suddenly. [Now Seinfeld, on the other hand, which I’ll admit I only watched perhaps twice or three times in total, was empty and meaningless without any appealing characters, IMHO. And it wasn’t funny. — FmH] As a psychiatrist, much of my initial interest in The Sopranos arose from the well-depicted psychotherapy plotline interwoven into it. Wouldn’t it be interesting to be a fly on the wall in Larry David’s shrink’s office too?
