Film: DVDs

Patricia Nicol

Curb Your Enthusiasm: The Complete Third Series
HBO, 15, 296 mins; £29.99 (2 DVDs)
Take some bubble wrap, a uniquely unattractive check jacket, a pubic hair and Martin Scorsese. Then add Larry David. What emerges is Krayzee-Eyez Killa, one of the 10 mini masterpieces in Curb’s third series, scripted and starred in by the Seinfeld creator and his team of crack improvisers. These episodes don’t so much have plots as mantraps: you know the drop is going to come for Larry, but is it because he is behaving too badly this time, or too well? It’s this twisted no-good-or-bad-deed-goes-unpunished metaphysic that puts David’s creation ahead of the pack. His Larry is greater than Basil Fawlty, because, unlike Fawlty, he isn’t a solipsistic freak; just a guy with an acute sense of what should be what, trying to outstare the world’s mechanical gaze. The results are painfully hilarious and viciously true. This is the best season yet, the David method (no rehearsals, no script, just a plot outline) producing an artful kind of comedy vérité that makes events more direct and caustic. And the season finale, in particular, will feature in “best of” lists for years to come, a triumphal raising of two fingers at all that is synthetically sacred in “polite” society. There’s an hour of extras in the set for devotees to treasure, offering cast and directors revealingly talking shop. Five stars