The wrong way and starts to get smirkily defensive

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He starts out relaxed, walking through his day with Sex And The City DVDs a cool, pendulous amble. Then he rubs someone the wrong way and starts to get smirkily defensive,Seinfeld’s creative team often described the sitcom as being "about nothing," but the show migrated quickly from low-key observational humor to complex plots laced with wackiness. Seinfeld co-creator Larry David stays pretty much in that vein with his HBO sitcom Curb Your Enthusiasm, the first season of which has now been collected on Law and Order Los Angeles DVDs. Shot and lit like a documentary (though it doesn’t pretend to be one), Curb Your Enthusiasm follows David as he goes about the business of being a rich, idle comedy writer. Each episode exaggerates vignettes of social embarrassment into miniature epics of outrage: David only has a minimal sense of decency, but he thinks he knows enough to fake his The Shield DVDs way through most social situations.

Peter Billingsley plays Shepherd’s grade-school self, dealing with bullies, weird relatives, and his worry that he won’t get a Red Ryder air rifle for Christmas. Writer-director Bob Clark had long dreamed of making a movie based on Shepherd’s work, and after working his way up through the horror/exploitation ghetto in the ’70s and Californication DVDs scoring a fluke hit with Porky’s, Clark took his moment of Hollywood clout and ran with it, developing a piece true to Shepherd’s finely detailed recollections and good-natured cynicism. A Christmas Story grasps the full scope of childhood injustice and obsession.

The problem is that Los Angeles in the 21st century isn’t the world David grew up in, and a typical Curb Your Enthusiasm plot has him inadvertently offending a friend of a friend or some member of the service industry, and getting in deeper as he tries to set matters right. The brilliance of the show lies in how it defines "the service industry," which has expanded in recent years to include personal shoppers, waiter captains, and incest-survivor-group leaders. David deals Stargate Atlantis DVDs with all of these people–whose functions are supposed to make his life easier–by going through the same three-stage mood swing episode after episode.Then he gets indignant, and settles into an extended, raspy shout. The show’s dialogue is semi-improvised, which creates a rougher, more offbeat rhythm than that of most television comedies, but the show isn’t exactly naturalistic, since so many members of the cast are professional comics.

Aside from David cronies like Richard Lewis and Little House on the Prairie DVDs Julia Louis-Dreyfus playing "themselves," the series’ two main regulars are Second City alum Jeff Garlin as David’s ineffectual manager and Groundlings alum Cheryl Hines as David’s patient wife. Curb Your Enthusiasm is a funny, scary distillation of David’s experience of the world, where nearly everything makes him angry, including his sense that he probably has no right to be angry. It’s surely the only sitcom in history designed to make its audience nervous.Most of the action takes place in ritzy mini-mansions and nouvelle-cuisine restaurants, but the show’s low-budget video look flattens the distinctions between the moneyed and the regular working slobs, and most of the stories have to do with David’s fortune being siphoned off by touchy proles.