HBO and comedian Larry David have jointly announced that the comedian's critically-acclaimed hit series will return for a ninth season after having been off the air since 2011. The show is expected to be available across all HBO platforms when released, but no premiere date has yet been set.
It looks like "pretty pretty good" news for Curb Your Enthusiasm fans, in the immortal words of Larry David's fictionalized version of himself, which he plays on the sitcom. The real David explained his sudden return with the tongue-in-cheek statement, "In the immortal words of Julius Caesar, 'I left, I did nothing, I returned.'"
Casey Bloys, president of HBO programming, chimed in, "We're thrilled that Larry has decided to do a new season of Curb and can't wait to see what he has planned."
For fans of the show, it has definitely been too long a wait. Although David's schedule has always been inconsistent, he managed to push out eight seasons and over 80 episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm from the show's 2000 debut to its most recent episode, which aired in 2011.
Since then, the show has remained on an indefinite hiatus. Although HBO announced that it would be happy to produce more episodes of Curb whenever Larry wishes to return, on numerous occasions, David publicly stated he wasn't sure if he would ever do another season.
One member of the top triumvirate of producer/director/writers on the show, David Mandel, insists that, despite the fears of concerned fans that Curb had seen its last season, he always knew Larry would eventually come around.
"I visited him in New York when he was doing his show last year," Mandel recalls, "It's like a joke but, he's always carried his little notebook. It was just a matter of being away from it just enough to miss it. I know it sounds silly, and I look very right and I look very correct now, but I always thought he would do it again."
Mandel reports that David is already writing for the new series of shows with longtime collaborator Jeff Schaffer. He also confirmed that fan favorites Jeff Garlin, Susie Essman and J.B. Smoove are all expected to return, but that everyone had to try to coordinate their schedules and other filming commitments now that David has given the green light on new Curb episodes.
The digital landscape has changed a lot since Curb Your Enthusiasm aired its last episode in 2011. At the time, HBO was still the undisputed king of pay TV and considered by the majority of fans as the source of the best quality premium programming, a title it recently lost to Netflix.
HBO will be eager to use Curb to try and regain some of its lost momentum, and will no doubt make it a mainstay of its two digital platforms, HBO Go and HBO Now. HBO's on-the-go service for cable subscribers HBO Go was only introduced just prior to the last season of Curb, and this will be the first time that the network's standalone delivery system HBO Now is available during a Curb Your Enthusiasm season.
