Seinfeld season 4 is the show's undisputed high-point, and Larry David has tinkered with the winning formula on his HBO show Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Seinfeld season 4 is the undisputed high-point of the sitcom, so much so that Larry David's follow-up show Curb Your Enthusiasm has remade it three times. The over-arching plot of Seinfeld season 4 saw Jerry and George develop a sitcom pilot with NBC, which was a very similar show to the real-life show developed by Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David. This meta plot was a step-up for Seinfeld's "show about nothing" mission statement, but season 4 also contained many of the best-loved individual episodes of the show.
For example, Larry David's favorite Seinfeld episode, "The Contest" has no bearing on the NBC plot, and is one of the best-loved episodes of the whole show. Larry David went on to create Curb Your Enthusiasm, a meta-sitcom about the fictionalized life of Seinfeld co-creator Larry David. Building on the meta-premise of Seinfeld season 4, David would occasionally dedicate a whole season of Curb to Larry attempting to get a sitcom project off the ground. Across Curb's 11 seasons, Larry David has remade Seinfled's overarching plot of a sitcom-in-development three times.
Curb season 2 opened with Larry developing a sitcom premise with Jason Alexander about a former sitcom star who struggles with typecasting. When Larry David and George Costanza actor Jason Alexander had the first of their many Curb fallouts, Larry took the project to Julia Louis-Dreyfus instead. Season 2 of Curb saw Louis-Dreyfus get more and more frustrated with Larry as they shopped their sitcom idea around the major networks.
Over the course of Curb season 2, Larry put their prospective deal with HBO at risk by accusing an executive of stealing shrimp, upset an ABC executive's daughter by giving her doll a haircut, and finally scuppered a deal with CBS by being accused of stealing cutlery. Unlike Seinfeld season 4, Larry and Julia never got their sitcom pilot into production, although Larry upsetting various network executives is very similar to how George alienated many of the NBC executives. With the Julia Louis-Dreyfus typecasting sitcom dead in the water, Curb would follow the production of another sitcom five years later.
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