Why Curb Your Enthusiasm Erased 1 Massive Larry David Detail After The Pilot (& Hasn’t Mentioned It For 24 Years)

Summary

• Curb Your Enthusiasm erased Larry David’s fictional children from the show after the 1999 pilot episode/TV special.
• The decision to remove Larry’s kids was due to difficulties in casting child actors and filming with child labor laws.
• Despite not having his own children on the show, Larry still has hilarious interactions with children in various storylines.

With Larry David playing a semi-fictionalized version of himself on Curb Your Enthusiasm, some parts of his real life that were worked into the 1999 mockumentary pilot were dropped when HBO soon turned it into a full series. Comedy shows later choosing not to move forward with certain characters, storylines, or details after their pilots get picked up happens frequently, so Curb Your Enthusiasm falling subject to this trend isn’t surprising. After all, the show’s origins are as a mockumentary-style special for HBO, with this format being done away with for the remainder of Curb Your Enthusiasm’s 12 seasons and counting.

For a show known for its ridiculous yet true-to-life misadventures and at times contradictory casting of notable actors, Curb Your Enthusiasm is shockingly consistent with details regarding main characters like Larry, Cheryl, Jeff, Susie, and Leon. While Curb Your Enthusiasm added plenty of new characters and changed its format entirely upon becoming a full series in 2000, it still maintains some astounding continuity with the 1999 mockumentary after over 24 years, including references to Larry’s “step-father excuse,” Jeff’s infidelity, and actors reprising roles as fictional HBO executives. However, one of the biggest details about Larry David’s life in Curb Your Enthusiasm was entirely erased after the pilot, and the change’s behind-the-scenes reason hilariously aligns with Larry’s characterization.

Larry David Mentions Having Children In Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Pilot Episode

Considering the real Larry David has two children, the fact that the semi-fictionalized comedian has kids in the 1999 mockumentary shouldn’t come as a surprise. When trying to come up with an excuse for why he didn’t attend a wake, Larry tells another character that he was at an event for his daughter’s school. Later in the pilot episode, Cheryl makes Larry swear on their children’s lives that he’s not having an affair after her friend saw him walking with Jeff’s mistress.

While Larry has at least two children with Cheryl in the 1999 Curb Your Enthusiasm outing, the HBO show erased them entirely after the pilot. Larry and Cheryl’s kids are never seen in the Curb Your Enthusiasm special, so it’s unclear how old they were supposed to be and whether he had two daughters or a daughter and a son. While Larry’s fictional kids helped him get out of some tough social situations in the pilot, Curb Your Enthusiasm decided to make married couple Larry and Cheryl childless when becoming a full series – but getting rid of them wasn’t always the plan.

Curb Your Enthusiasm Dropped Larry’s Kids Because Of Filming Issues & Long Delays In Casting

At one point, Curb Your Enthusiasm was actually going to include Larry and Cheryl’s referenced children in the series. However, Larry David continued to put off casting kids for the roles, with director Robert Weide explaining part of the reason was the difficulty in casting actors at that age as well as issues in filming that come with child labor laws limiting their hours on set (via The Telegraph). After delaying the casting and realizing the set design of Larry’s house would have to be changed to reflect young kids, David decided to erase them altogether, with the only major recurring child character on the show ultimately being Jeff and Susie’s daughter, Sammi.

The real Larry David deciding to go back on the detail of his character having children simply because of inconvenience seems like it could be its own Curb Your Enthusiasm episode. Though Larry having kids could have led to some interesting storylines for his character, the semi-fictional comedian still has plenty of hilarious interactions with children on the show, including those with Sammy, Greg, and various kids in his neighborhood. While what might have become of Larry and Chery’s children from the pilot may never be known, Curb Your Enthusiasm dropping that detail seems to have benefited where Larry’s stories can go.

Source: The Telegraph

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  Curb Your Enthusiasm

  Release Date:

  2000-10-15

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  Seasons:

  11

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