Plea: 'Curb' Should Do An SBF Episode Before It Ends

Remember when Larry David did a Super Bowl commercial for FTX? The CEO is in prison now!

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HBO

The first time I read the name “Sam Bankman-Fried” was right after I saw a Super Bowl commercial for something called FTX. A few confused Googles later, I was learning all about the company’s disheveled CEO, his belief in “effective altruism,” his political donations, and the usual business freak hagiography about how little he slept (on a bean bag next to his desk!) because he was so busy grinding. This guy was so busy making money (so that he could give it away!) that he couldn’t cut his hair.

The Super Bowl commercial that inspired me to learn about this man aired in 2022 and it starred Larry David, as a guy who poo poos great ideas throughout history. Ignoring the fact that it was for a fraudulent company, the ad was pretty good! (Pret-tay, pret-tay…)

That company’s founder, Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF, for brevity’s sake) was convicted of losing $9 billion of FTX customer money in October and is still awaiting sentencing. David, meanwhile, currently appears in the twelfth and allegedly final season of his meta-fictional HBO comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm.

I’ve been watching this season, and it’s been strong. Some of the ongoing storylines include Maria Sofia (played by Keyla Monterroso Mejia, who’s fantastic), the now breakout star of “Young Larry” who was only cast because of a blackmail scheme involving a drowned burglar and Larry’s pool. There’s also the city councilwoman, played by Tracy Ullman, who Larry started dating to get out of having to fence his pool, but now has to stay with because she just got sober, even though she’s the most annoying person in the world (there’s an ongoing bit in which she can’t stop singing the JG Wentworth lawer jingle). It’s good to be reminded how funny Tracy Ullman is.

I only included all that exposition because it’s fun to trace the show’s plotlines, an intricate quilt of mostly mundane events. That little things seem to snowball and big things just kind of come and go is part of what makes Curb Your Enthusiasm great. I’ll miss it when it’s gone, and I’m already anxiously thinking about all the Curb takes we’re not going to get from a show that only has a few episodes left.

My modest proposal: Curb Your Enthusiasm should do an SBF episode.

Basically every celebrity in the world spent 2020-2022 collecting massive checks from the crypto industry to launder their bullshit, so it’s not as if Larry David is uniquely culpable in this. The list of other celebrities to appear in crypto ads is massive, including *deep breath* Matt Damon, Spike Lee, Tom Brady, Gisele Bundchen, Lebron James, Gwyneth Paltrow, Floyd Mayweather, Kim Kardashian, Shaquille O’Neal… plus Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Michael Lewis, for kissing SBF’s ass at a self-thrown conference in the Bahamas; Joe Biden, and most of congress on both sides, where FTX was one of the largest donors in the 2022 cycle. And many, many more (remember Fallon comparing Ape NFTs with Paris Hilton?). At a certain level, it would’ve been dumb to miss out on free money when these companies were just giving it away.

And so I’m not arguing that Curb should do an SBF episode out of penance. It’s just that Larry David is one of the few celebrities associated with crypto in general and SBF in particular from whom we might actually expect honest introspection. I’m not expecting Tom Brady to have an interesting take on SBF, he probably gets paid to endorse heinous shit all the time.

Larry David did a commercial for the company in February. By November the entire thing had collapsed. Now the founder is in prison. What a weird situation! Isn’t Curb built on those? What’s it like being talked into something you kind of have an inkling is a bad idea, only to allow yourself to be swayed, and then finding out almost instantly that you should’ve trusted your gut in the first place?

The Bankman-Fried family, Maria Sofia-like, even managed to talk David and the commercial producers into letting Sam Bankman-Fried’s father, Joseph, have a cameo in the commercial. Joseph plays a colonialist in the Declaration of Independence scene. Sam’s younger brother Gabe made the request, according to Bloomberg, since Joseph, a tax law professor at Stanford, was “too humble” to do it himself. Railroaded by a family of dead-eyed, poofy-haired grifters from Palo Alto. Tell me there’s not a Curb scene there.

Here’s David talking about the situation:

“I asked friends of mine who were well-versed in this stuff, who I asked if I should do the ad,” David says. “Is there anything wrong with me dong this? You know, is this okay? And they said yeah yeah, this is totally on the up and up, yeah it's fine, do it. So like an idiot, I did it, But... yeah. I'm in a class-action lawsuit, which I would like to be part of, because part of my salary was in crypto. So I lost a lot of money.”

Oh right, a lawsuit. Of course David was named in a class action alongside Tom Brady and Shaq and Steph Curry. Just in case SBF really did lose all his and his customers’ money making bad bets on crypto, it’s probably a good strategy to go after all the wealthy people from the commercials who still have some.

And sure, you could argue that the SBF story is too “big” for Curb, a show that thrives on absurd little moments and the petty indignities of modern life (even for characters who are super rich). My favorite parts of the show invariably involve jokes about trivial peeves, like restaurants who won’t let you order eggs after 11 or golf courses who make you tuck your shirt in (I’m embarrassed about how much I related to the “Disgruntled” episode). In that sense, I can understand the argument that Larry getting roped into a world-altering funny money scheme is too big, too exotic, for a show about niche gripes. Still, I think Curb could make it work. Think of all the knock-on effects of crypto collapse. Maybe a lesser celebrity is pissed at Larry for convincing him to make bad investments; the guy who plays Turtle from Entourage or something. I don’t know, I’m just spitballing here.

I just hope that the lawyers and naysayers don’t ruin it for us. There are so few episodes of Curb left, I’m worried that if we never get one about FTX, the world will be denied an iconic slice of a truly deranged time period. Larry David is an incredulous man for a credulous time. I’d love to see him riff on the time even he got suckered.

CODA: I started writing this just before frequent Curb guest-star Richard Lewis died. Lewis was a famous comedian, but what would his legacy be without Curb? Now that he’s gone, I feel that much luckier that he gave us so many great Curb scenes. Lewis was the perfect Larry David foil, equally self-interested and neurotic, but romantic and over-earnest where David is curmudgeonly and reflexively cynical. It’s not easy to play up that kind of personality for laughs, to let yourself be the butt of those kinds of jokes (or play the “straight” man to Larry, depending on what the scene required), and to do it well. Lewis did it beautifully. RIP.