When Barack and Michelle Obama announced, in 2018, that they were transitioning from politics to showbusiness – pulling a “reverse Trump”, in effect – everyone more or less knew what to expect. Establishing their own media company, Higher Ground Productions, the former president and first lady set about producing exactly the sort of projects you would half-cockedly presume the Obamas would put their name to: sober, fact-based dramas like Worth (about the 9/11 victims’ fund) or Rustin (about underacknowledged civil rights organiser Bayard Rustin), or stately documentaries with titles like Our Great National Parks. So it is slightly out of the blue that we get the latest Obama project – Life, Larry, and the Pursuit of Unhappiness, an irreverent sketch show conceived and fronted by famed Curb Your Enthusiasm antisocialite Larry David.
Barack doesn’t just produce but also at one point stars in HBO’s new seven-part series, which takes famous moments from US history (the signing of the Declaration of Independence, the Boston Tea Party, that sort of thing) and inserts David, playing more or less himself. (A comparison might be something like Mel Brooks’ time-hopping A History of the World, Part I or its dismal streaming follow-up.) Each sketch, largely unscripted, plays out much in the vein of Curb, only here, David’s inane interpersonal quarrels are brought into absurd juxtaposition with momentous historical backdrops. But there’s no getting around it: as a team-up, Larry David and the Obamas are a completely confounding match.
