After 12 seasons, the curtain will finally fall on HBO’s beloved long-standing sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm this Sunday. The comedic series follows a fictionalized version of real-life writer and comedian Larry David and his misadventures dealing with the trivialities of everyday life. As part of the farewell season, HBO has released videos of two of the show’s stars saying goodbye, each speaking from a set where their respective characters’ decorative sensibilities are on full display.
For Susie Essman, who plays Susie Greene, that means bidding adieu from her character’s bedroom in a classically Susie hot pink pajama set with fringe hems. In the video, she sits on top of a leopard print duvet which covers a bed with a dark wood headboard and frame. “This is our last day shooting in this house and this is our last season,” Essman says with a mixture of mock and real emotion. The bedroom walls are painted in a deep lavender, while a lighter version of the color appears in two paintings on either side of the bed above a pair of nightstands. “My thought was that [the character Susie] hired a decorator but had a lot of influence of her own,” set decorator Eden Barr told IndieWire of Greene’s room. The overall feel reflects Essman’s character well: brash, bold, and obliviously tacky.
Leon Black, David’s initially uninvited house guest turned permanent roommate played by J.B. Smoove, is another character with a big personality. But since the house and furniture in “his” personal spaces technically belong to David, the decor reflects a mixture of the two characters. David’s character filled the living space with the kind of nondescript and dated furniture you may expect to find in a guest house, including a flatscreen television. Black added his own personal touches, like the throwback 1980s pin-up girl posters on the wall and a black light velvet painting. “The big furniture is all Larry’s,” Barr says, “but Leon has ‘Leon-ed’ it up with things that make it his happy place.” As Smoove walks around the living area in his video tour, he highlights items like his tiny “tree of life” and a small brass elephant.
Curb Your Enthusiasm premiered with a one-hour special on HBO in 1999.
