What do you get when you pair Larry David of "Curb Your Enthusiasm" fame with a former U.S. President?
By most press accounts, not much. Or, to use some "Curb" speak, "pretty bad TV. Pretty, pretty bad TV."
The reviews are in for HBO Max's "Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness." The new, seven-part series, co-created by David and produced by former President Barack Obama, is a sad rehash of old "Curb" jokes told by David's former collaborators.
Think Jeff Garlin, Jerry Seinfeld, Susie Essman, Vince Vaughn and more.
No Chery Hines, though. She flew too close to the Trump administration via hubby Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and wasn't invited to the reunion party. She may have been the lucky one.
Consider some of the headlines for the just-released series.
- Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness review – a total TV shambles from Larry David - The Guardian
- 'Life, Larry' and America's Unhappy Birthday - The New York Times
- 'Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness' Is Dad-Joke Heaven - Time
Get the drift?
Here's a sample from The Guardian:
Life, Larry and … is seven half-hour episodes in search of a punchline. E pluribus unum. The luckier instalments find two, maybe three. God save the rest.
It helps explain why the 12th and final season of "Curb" proved to be so shockingly thin.
The reviews do more than trash the series, which multiple critics call a creative misfire that recycles old "Curb" gags to ill effect. It lets the critics heap praise on His Holy Obama while trashing President Donald Trump.
Yes, the media's liberal bias extends to arts coverage. And how.
Still, the efforts to worship the former president are well north of embarrassing.
It is always an emotional blow to see former US president Barack Obama pop up on one’s screen. The Instagram algorithm sends me a lot of him... The algorithm does not know that I jack-knife in pain before I click and weep softly at how far we – the US sneezed, but the UK has surely caught a cold – have fallen.
Wait ... is "Life" any good, or do you want to sob over a president who left office more than a decade ago?
We expect such partisan drivel from The New York Times ... and boy, does the paper's critic deliver:
The president circumvented a congressional nonprofit and created his own group to engineer a more partisan-tinged celebration. When a list of bygone musical acts quit a planned concert series in Washington, he reimagined it as a "rally" with himself as the headliner. He hulked up the White House grounds with an ultimate-fighting octagon, presiding over a bloody pay-streaming Colosseum where one of his combatants boorishly misgendered the former first lady Michelle Obama.
Wait ... is "Life" any good, or did we wander into the paper's op-ed section?
Leave it to the Times scribe to bring it all home at the end, though.
You can understand why HBO signed up Larry David for this star-spangled special; the pursuit of unhappiness is his comedic life’s work. But it feels a little redundant after the country has already pursued unhappiness, and caught it.
The funniest review, hands down, goes to IndieWire. The site loathed the seven-part series but, in a way, that made it ... great.
While “Life, Larry, and The Pursuit of Unhappiness” doesn’t exactly lambaste the U.S. of A. every chance it gets (its subtitle, “An Almost History of America,” feels like placation), David and co-creator Jeff Schaffer make it easy for anyone suffering from a lack of patriotism to tap into an undercurrent of dissatisfaction.
So, it's more therapy for a Left still reeling from Stephen Colbert's early retirement.
Got it.
The real headline behind "Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness" is clear: David has lost his comedic fastball, much like Steven Spielberg's latest, "Disclosure Day," suggests his glory days are long over.
The dog-bites-man part of this hard-Left narrative? Critics will take any and every opportunity to skewer President Trump. And, for as a bonus, they'll do anything to avoid honoring their nation's 250th birthday.
