Larry David has managed to transcend Seinfeld. By Robert Lloyd.

LARRY David, the Seinfeld co-creator, continues to forge new comic fields with Curb Your Enthusiasm, the brilliant, cinema verite-style, semi-improvised sitcom, in which David plays a "more likeable" version of himself.

Notwithstanding near-universal critical support and mainstream official nods - the third season received 10 Emmy nominations (and one win, for director Robert B. Weide) and a Golden Globe as the year's best comedy - the show is not everybody's idea of fun. ("It's a sad day for the Golden Globes," David said, accepting his trophy.)

While it bumps along to a soundtrack that calls to mind the gentle works of Laurel and Hardy or Jacques Tati, Curb is a comedy of hostility, resentment, paranoia and obsession. There are no feel-good moments, no life-brightening epiphanies, nothing, in fact, even vaguely resembling a resolution; things get as bad as you feared, and then the credits roll. (Like life itself, some might say.)

David's Hollywood is a small town of taken-for-granted privilege, a place of misread signs, imagined slights and gossip, where one man's dental plaque becomes the stuff of dinner-party conversation. The show's more outlandish conceptions are made believable by its improvised rhythms, documentary feel and use of real LA locations - Canter's Deli, Opaline restaurant, the Mint nightclub and the Pantages theatre all appear - and famous people cast as slightly twisted versions of their famous selves.

Mel Brooks, Ben Stiller, David Schwimmer and old favourites Richard Lewis and Ted Danson are on board for the fourth season, with the likes of Shelley Berman, Paul Mazursky and Philip Baker Hall in what I suppose would be called "dramatic" roles. Cheryl Hines plays David's wife and truly seems married to him; off-screen they have a kind of frighteningly honest relationship that does not preclude insult, but one can imagine they amuse each other. Jeff Garlin, who plays David's agent and best friend, is similarly bonded to him.

The fourth season finds, among many other devilishly intertwined story lines, Brooks persuading David to join the Broadway production of The Producers opposite Stiller, who finds him insufficiently committed. "It's not that I'm not working as hard," David says of their rehearsals, "but it looks more effortless, maybe."

If David is vain and self-centred ("You're such a baby," Stiller tells him, "you're a grown-man baby") and paranoid - believing, for instance, that the weatherman has been predicting rain to keep the golf course clear for himself - he is also, much of the time, the most logical man in the room. The problem is that he's right about the wrong things, about hypocritical or pointless social conventions the rest of the world accepts. He's like a small child who will not stop asking questions everyone else has decided it is pointless to answer.

But as a man of principle, albeit misguided, he can be regarded - in the right light - as heroic. David has a deep, if wayward, sense of loyalty and a lack of prejudice that sometimes expresses itself as a kind of democratic insensitivity - yelling at a man in a motorised wheelchair, "You almost hit my car! Learn how to drive that thing!" Or telling a blind man whose girlfriend has lied about her looks, "What's the difference what she looks like? You can't see her anyway."

It means he thinks nothing of bringing a Muslim woman (Moon Zappa in a chador) to a delicatessen, or happily sitting down there with a party of disabled men who had done an earnest but bad job of washing his wife's car. He is thoroughly, helplessly honest, except when he's afraid of being punched.

"There's something about this middle-aged bald guy that is thrilling," Brooks tells his sceptical associates. It's strange but true.

Series three of Curb Your Enthusiasm screens weeknights at 8pm on the Comedy Channel. Series four premieres Monday, October 30 at 8pm.

LOS ANGELES TIMES