The Rundown: HBO Should Just Slip Larry David Into All Of Its Shows (At Least Just A Little?)

The Rundown is a weekly column that highlights some of the biggest, weirdest, and most notable events of the week in entertainment. The number of items could vary, as could the subject matter. It will not always make a ton of sense. Some items might not even be about entertainment, to be honest, or from this week. The important thing is that it’s Friday, and we are here to have some fun.

Something kind of cool happened this week. Alan Dershowitz, the famous attorney who recently did some work with various figures in the Trump administration, told a story about running into Larry David, co-creator of Seinfeld and star of Curb Your Enthusiasm. Per Dersh, the interaction went down something like this…

Dershowitz: “We can still talk, Larry.”

David: “No. No. We really can’t. I saw you. I saw you with your arm around [Trump Secretary of State Mike] Pompeo! It’s disgusting!”

Dershowitz: “He’s my former student [at Harvard Law]. I greet all of my former students that way. I can’t greet my former students”

David: “It’s disgusting. Your whole enclave — it’s disgusting. You’re disgusting!”

Which is… I mean, it’s perfect. Both the thing where Larry David is apparently always 100 percent Larry David whether the cameras are on or off or nowhere nearby and the thing where he used the word “enclave.” That’s a really good word. I don’t use it enough. I suspect you don’t either. Let’s all try to slip it into a conversation at some point this weekend, just to see how it goes. I bet it’ll feel great. I’m excited.

Reading that got me thinking, though. A lot. About how strange it must be to be friends with Larry David, sure, but also about what a singular personality he has. How no one else is really like him, now or at any other point in history. And that got me thinking about how much fun it would be to just parachute him, as himself, into various other shows in the HBO family.

Larry David cussing out Kendall Roy inside an upscale coffee shop in an episode of Succession.

Larry David on The Righteous Gemstones talking to Baby Billy Freeman about the finer points of Judaism and why organized religion as a whole is a sham.

Larry David on Euphoria talking to Rue about… I don’t know… scratchy sweaters. For the full hour.

Larry David with NoHo Hank on Barry doing a whole bit about criminal organizations and contract killings and why he could never do it for some small reason that’s extremely important to him.

Larry David on Westworld complaining about the robots.

Larry David on Hacks discussing the finer points of comedy with Deborah and pissing her off royally in the process.

Larry David as a guest in the hotel on The White Lotus.

Larry David and Nathan Fielder having the single most awkward/interesting conversation in history on The Rehearsal.

Larry David ranting about dragons on one of many Game of Thrones-based spin-offs.

It could work. Maybe. Just a little. Or it could be terrible. I suspect I will like it either way, though. And really, isn’t that the important thing here

Earlier this week, although it somehow feels like a month ago (this is how time works sometimes), rumors started bubbling about a rift between Desus and Mero, the hosts of, well, Desus & Mero. This was a bummer and something I hoped was not true because Desus and Mero are funny and funny together and had been doing stuff on television that no one else was doing, really. The day went on and the whole thing came to a boil and neither of them commented on it, which was weird because both of them are super online. Then, just after closing of business on the East Coast, this happened.

— DESUS & MERO on SHOWTIME (@SHODesusAndMero) July 18, 2022

I’m going to come back to the rest of it in a second, but first, let’s all take a second and think about how fast this all happened. We’re talking, like, hours between rumors being floated and the whole thing ending. That’s kind of crazy. Something had obviously been simmering for a while and this was just the heat being cranked up to high, but still. Hours. If you worked the night shift and got home at 8 am and slept from 9-5, you could have gone from thinking everything was fine to watching the world burn in a flash. The internet is wild.

More importantly, this stinks. I don’t care too much about the whys or the hows of it all ended, I’m just sad it did. The story itself is so cool. They were just two funny dudes on Twitter who got plopped together for a project and they kept turning that into more projects until they were full-on interviewing Barack Obama on a premium cable channel. That… it kind of doesn’t happen. If there was a movie where that happened, you’d be like “uh huh, sure.” It’s all very cool.

And they did cool stuff once they had the chance, in addition to talking to a slew of famous people and breaking the form of that kind of show a little. Like this. They did that. It was cool. Uproxx’s Aaron Williams said it all better than I’m saying it.

Before Desus & Mero, it’s hard to find too many examples of hip-hop culture in the late-night TV space. Sure there was Arsenio Hall, doing his best to bring the fashion, music, and voice of the streets to America’s living rooms in the early ’90s. But while The Arsenio Hall Show was a landmark in bringing hip-hop to mainstream audiences, it was also watered-down, polished, and presented in a way that the whole thing slicker and more palatable to those audiences. It also largely avoided political topics, although the show did come under fire for booking — or not booking — some guests that audiences found controversial.

Again, cool. I should probably stop talking about them in the past tense, though. They’re still around and doing stuff, just as Desus and Mero instead of Desus & Mero. I’d love to see Desus get another late-night show, like maybe in James Corden’s empty slot. I’d love to see Mero get a crack at daytime television, maybe the Wendy Williams slot. I’d love to fast-forward 5-10 years for the reunion special. But right now, I’m just bummed out. I wish them both the best, but I’m bummed out.

— Russell Crowe (@russellcrowe) July 18, 2022

What we have here:

This made me so happy when I saw it. It’s still making me happy right now, days later. Imagine you’re on vacation in Rome and a sweaty Russell Crowe offers to pose for a selfie with you. Imagine how you’d react. I hope he just starts doing this, hanging around the outside of the Colosseum offering to pose for pictures with people. I hope he starts charging, like, $5 for them. Not so much where you’re like “Damn, Russell Crowe is really greedy and/or down on his luck.” Just enough to be funny. Maybe $4. I like the idea of him making change for people.

Russell Crowe, please consider this.