More than 25 years later, Ted Danson is sharing his honest initial reaction to Curb Your Enthusiasm.
The 3x Golden Globe winner explained how the show “changed my life,” despite originally thinking the Larry David-created HBO sitcom “absolutely sucked” before he began appearing as himself on Season 1.
“Curb really did change my life because it reinvigorated my desire to be funny,” he told co-star J.B. Smoove on his Where Everybody Knows Your Name podcast. “But we watched the pilot, Mary and I. Mary thought it was great. I thought it sucked.
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“I thought it absolutely sucked, and I felt sorry for my new friend, Larry David. So, in trying to be an encouraging kind of thing, I said, ‘If you ever need us to play ourselves, we’d be happy to.’ And in that sort of idiocy, I ended up being part of something that changed my life,” added Danson.
Since debuting alongside wife Mary Steenburgen as themselves in the 2000 Season 1 episode ‘Ted and Mary’, Danson has gone on to appear in 34 episodes of the series.
Curb Your Enthusiasm‘s 12th and final season aired this year. Although the show originally ran for eight seasons from 1999 to 2011 (including the original hour-long special), HBO revived the show in 2017, running for another four seasons.
While discussing his new Netflix series A Man on the Inside, Danson previously told Deadline how he selects roles. “You always want to be kind of subversively funny,” he explained. “If you make me laugh, I’ll sit around for the next thing you want to say to me, even if it’s not funny. You’re intelligent because you made me laugh. I’m in a good mood. So go ahead. If I need to take a little medicine or go serious or whatever, I’m much more in the mood. I think it’s true in life, and it’s very true in something like this.