The series finale of Curb Your Enthusiasm earned ratings that were pretty, pretty good for the show (hey, it’s probably the last time we can appropriate Larry David’s signature praise).
The April 7 finale had a first-night audience of 1.1 million viewers on HBO and Max (including replays), which was the best performance for Curb since the season 10 finale drew 1.4 million cross-platform viewers in March 2020. The initial airing on HBO drew 530,000 viewers — about 51 percent higher than the show’s linear average for the previous nine episodes — with streaming on Max and replays contributing the remaining 570,000 viewers.
For its final season, Curb Your Enthusiasm is averaging 4.9 million viewers per episode, a 14 percent improvement on the 4.3 million people who watched season 11 in 2021. That’s on the lower end of some recent HBO shows like True Detective: Night Country (12.7 million), Succession (8.7 million) and season two of The White Lotus (10.1 million). Curb did outdraw the final season of Barry (3.4 million viewers).
The series finale found David’s fictional alter ego on trial in Atlanta for violating a real-life Georgia law that bars giving food or drinks to people waiting in line to vote. The trial also let David and showrunner Jeff Schaffer revisit the 1998 Seinfeld finale, which David wrote and has defended for years despite its very mixed reception at the time.
“A trial was a possible ending. We weren’t sure what we were going to do for an ending, but that was a possibility,” Schaffer told The Hollywood Reporter after the finale aired. “And once we realized we could do this meta joke of Larry never learning a lesson — and oh by the way, he’s going to steer the Titanic right back into that [Seinfeld] iceberg — that’s when we knew that was the end of the season and that’s when we knew that was the end of the series. From that point on, everything was just figuring out how to seed things in. How much and how little we wanted to. But from that moment on, we knew that had to be the end of the series, because that was the funniest end of the series.”
