When did Larry quit Seinfeld? Not as finally as everyone remembers
Larry David co-created Seinfeld, ran it for seven seasons, and wrote classics like "The Contest" and "The Puffy Shirt". Then, in May 1996 — with the show still the biggest thing on American television — he walked away.
Except "walked away" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Here's what actually happened.
The exit
David's last episode as showrunner was "The Invitations," the season 7 finale that aired on May 16, 1996 — the one where Susan dies licking toxic wedding-invitation envelopes. He left the day-to-day running of the show after that, and NBC's crown jewel carried on without him for seasons 8 and 9, with Jerry Seinfeld taking over as the sole boss.
It wasn't a fight, and it wasn't exhaustion. Asked by Charlie Rose in 1998 why he'd left, David said it wasn't burnout and he still had plenty of ideas:
"I had done that, and now I wanted to try something else," David told Charlie Rose in 1998.
Jason Alexander later told Marc Maron's WTF podcast that David found making the show enormously stressful and would declare after tapings that it couldn't be done again — and there was a running joke on set that he threatened to quit after every season.
He never fully left
This is the part memory tends to erase. Even after quitting, David kept one foot in the building:
- The Steinbrenner voice — David voiced George's boss, the fictionalized Yankees owner, right through to the end of season 9.
- The finale — he returned to write the two-part series finale that aired on May 14, 1998, and drew more than 76 million viewers.
- The Curb reunion — season 7 of Curb Your Enthusiasm in 2009 staged a full fictional Seinfeld reunion, cast and all.
- The do-over — the 2024 Curb series finale deliberately mirrored — and poked at — the divisive Seinfeld ending he'd written 26 years earlier.
What he did with the time off
The "something else" was Sour Grapes, a 1998 comedy film he wrote and directed. Critics hated it — Roger Ebert especially. Two years later, David launched Curb Your Enthusiasm on HBO, which ran for 12 seasons across 24 years and settled any question about who was right to bet on himself.