What I’m Watching: Curb Your Enthusiasm

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Season 9, Episode 2 “The Pickle Gambit” (B+)

Leave it to Larry to decide that giving life advice to a prostitute was the best use of his time when he was trying to leave a hotel he was hiding out in while in disguise. Shockingly, it appears to have worked, and therefore he was warmly greeted by the newly respectable dress-wearing member of society upon his secretive return so that he could help atone for his pickle jar-opening mistake that injured Marty’s nephew, played by Niall Cunningham from “Life in Pieces.” This show does manage to capture societal oddities and exaggerate them into focus like no others, with the desire for people to be the hero and open a pickle jar being the most prominent in this episode. Larry’s purposeful decision to ignore the tongs and pick up the cookie with his far more effective fingers was hilarious, and the fact that the Iranian consul did it wasn’t even the what led to that lifeline falling apart. Larry has managed to hire the most hapless security team by putting Leon in charge, stopping not one but two sexual encounters prematurely, and clearly he’s not able to be in control at all, hopeless to get them to stop yelling questions about towels at him while he was on the phone. Ted coming over to ask if he could date Cheryl was surely just the start of a lengthier plotline of Larry trying to break them up, and I love that he spotted Mary with a guy who looked exactly like him after she blew him off by saying that she wasn’t physically attracted to him. Marty’s chronicle of the many meetings they had following the divorce was pretty funny to.