Yesterday I was explaining the premise of Curb Your Enthusiasm to somebody, and today I watched a bunch of clips on YouTube. The thing that Larry does best is end his seasons with a serious kicker–it’s the punchline for the uber-joke that was being told for the last couple of months. Like, what about that third season?? Or the sixth season (which I still haven’t seen, but have heard enough about to feel like I had)??!! And then, through watching clips, I came across this LD-Marty Scorsese stuff. And it’s funny. It’s a great sendup of gangster movies. But it doesn’t look at all like Scorsese shot it. Then I thought about how HBO shows tend to look cheap. They’re written wonderfully, and with terrific acting and directing, but most of them look like they’re shot with a camcorder in a basement. A couple exceptions are Flight of the Conchords and especially Sopranos. (And I know there are others, but I’m not about to do the kind of research that it takes to write something well! So deal with it!!)

Maybe this low-budget style makes it easier to pay great actors, and allow great writers to take as long as they want to come up with something. And maybe it’s essential to the improvisational, or live performance, quality of Curb and Tenacious D. Anyhow, once streaming HBO exists officially, all I’ll do anymore is watch it.