It’s back, people! Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 12 will be the final season of Larry David’s curmudgeonly daytime program. The first episode of the last season, “Atlanta,” feels like one of Curb’s best premieres in a long time. It keeps up the same level of nitpicky energy while touching on larger underlying themes and ideas and reintroducing some long-standing characters, like Auntie Rae and Larry’s problematic relationship with dogs.
After Season 11 ended a few years ago, “Atlanta”‘s opening scenes bring viewers up to date on the current situation. To Larry’s chagrin, young Larry has become a tremendous hit, and on the strength of it, the annoying Maria Sofia has become an overnight sensation.
In related news, Larry is still living with Irma and is counting down the days until he can break up with her. Her sponsor informed him that she wouldn’t be able to cope with their relationship ending for at least six months. It’s conceivable that these two issues will be season-long side stories.
This episode features Maria, although the main focus is on her fat dog Pechuca. As with most of the other episodes, “Atlanta” is a maze of short-term subplots that at first seem to be unrelated to one another but cleverly and satisfyingly weave together throughout the show.
Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 12 Episode 1 Recap
The main attraction is Larry’s trip to Atlanta, where he will be attending a wealthy African businessman’s birthday celebration. Because of Maria’s success with Young Larry, he is going with him, as is Leon because his family—including Auntie Rae—all reside there.
Not only does Leon get the best one-liner of the show when he remarks that Huckleberry Finn “looks wet all the time,” but it’s also good to see Auntie Rae again. When Rae tries on Larry’s glasses, the stems are distorted, so he has to borrow some that fit okay but look awful on him. Larry tries to get by with his old ones because of the latter argument, but they fall into the motel toilet.
Being Larry, he tries to play the maid, whom he has already irritated, by leaving his belongings all over the place in the hopes that she will find them for him. However, this backfires when she throws all of his things from the balcony, thinking that she is “going out with a bang,” because it is her last day.
Although Larry has a contractual duty to be kind during the birthday celebration, he is unable to do so since he keeps running into issues that most people would just ignore. One is that Larry doesn’t think Michael Fouchay, the host, is truly “African” because he is a white South African.
The other is that he meets Brooke, a woman whose friends gleefully refer to her as Brookie; nevertheless, Larry is cautioned not to address her by such a term because he doesn’t know her well. Before someone who has only met Brooke once names her Brookie without being reprimanded for it—a mistake for which Larry was promptly corrected—Larry is already perplexed by the entire situation.
It’s precisely the kind of trivial drivel Curb that has a history of centring entire episodes around. Fouchay declines to give Larry his money after his antics at the party. They attempt to mend their split in the same way that apartheid was ostensibly healed when Larry goes to confront him, and things work out very nicely.
But at the beginning of the episode, Larry developed a new habit of unintentionally butt-dialing people. When Pechuca butt-dials Fouchay, he overhears Larry criticizing him and chooses to withhold payment once more. As Auntie Rae waits in line to cast her ballot in a local election, Larry returns her spectacles, setting off a bit of a cliffhanger in the season premiere.