- Network: HBO
- Series Premiere Date: Jun 26, 2026
Critic Reviews
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You know who the good and the bad guys are, and who you’re meant to be rooting for, even if the answer is frequently no one. In other words, it all feels a little safe. If David isn’t quite apologizing for loosing his self-interested monsters upon the world, he seems intent on making sure we know we’re supposed to be laughing at and not with them.
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While the sketches in Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness sound great on paper, many feel a little tame in the execution. One problem is the format. .... It all feels too tightly scripted.
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The dialogue of Life, Larry And The Pursuit Of Unhappiness has the shaggy, off-the-cuff feel of Curb, or Schaffer’s fantasy-football comedy The League—but within the confines of a sketch, there’s no time to meander toward the type of explosive conclusions that those shows could sometimes reach.
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Larry David throws comic darts at 250 years of American history. What a shame his aim is off. Prettaaay prettaaay good, it’s not.
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It's pretty, pretty mediocre.
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It manages to turn great events of history into mundane observational comedy.
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Sometimes it's funny. Most of the time, unfortunately, it's just cringey.
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The things here that don’t remind you of Curb Your Enthusiasm will probably remind you of Drunk History or Hulu’s semi-recent History of the World, Part II.
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Some of it is pretty, pretty, pretty good. And some of it plays like a group of friends getting together to do interminable improv bits keyed to the stubbornly broad and diffuse subject of U.S. history.
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Takes a simple premise—what if David annoyed people throughout American history?—and hammers viewers over the head with it for thirty minutes at a time.
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There are outrageous bits that work. Others that begin well and then fall over: Mr. David does a fairly dead-on impersonation of Joseph McCarthy, but the sketch has nowhere else to go and so turns frantic. Others begin awkwardly and end well. .... They have little sense of direction, though. Likewise, “Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness.”