Larry David History Sketch Show Called Total TV
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- Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness is a seven-episode, half-hour sketch series produced by Barack and Michelle Obama's Higher Ground Productions, with each episode built around 3-4 sketches featuring Larry David in period costume.
- Larry David plays figures including a Continental Congress delegate (who wants to ban shared umbrellas, shared desserts, and post-7-January new year greetings), Alexander Graham Bell on the phone to Watson, a McCarthy hearings participant, a WWI trench soldier, the third Wright brother, and a bus passenger next to Rosa Parks — but the reviewer says the material amounts to familiar Curb Your Enthusiasm shtick "in period costume."
- Barack Obama introduces the series from what the reviewer assumes is his new Presidential Center, and the review calls this masterclass of comic timing the best part of the show — worth watching on its own.
- Sketches touching on race — including the Rosa Parks bus bit, where Larry bores her into moving to the back, and an Underground Railroad episode where Larry's guests refuse to help out as "slave stuff" — are described as "exercises in punch-pulling and punching down."
- Jerry Seinfeld guest-stars in a Lewis and Clark sketch built around the two men trying to get away from their wives; the reviewer singles it out as a low point, alongside a McCarthy hearings sketch that "goes on almost as long as the witch hunts themselves."
- The reviewer likens the overall material to HL Mencken's definition of a hotdog — "the sweepings of the abattoir" — and concludes that the show "depends for any success on a blend of faith and nostalgia that is almost indistinguishable from charity."
Why it matters: The review lands as a notable critical setback for Higher Ground Productions, the Obama-founded TV company, whose first major scripted sketch vehicle with Larry David is being dismissed as a misfire. For David, whose reputation rests on skewering hypocrisy, the reviewer's chief complaints — recycled material and racial humor that "punches down" — suggest the Curb formula does not survive the translation to historical sketch comedy.
