Curb Your Enthusiasm boss: "We made the decision to set the new season in a post-COVID world"

The Hollywood Reporter

Curb executive producer and Dave co-creator Jeff Schaffer tells The Hollywood Reporter what it's like producing the two comedies -- which both returned to production last month -- amid the pandemic. Turns out Curb was shut down for one day after a production member tested positive. Schaffer, who provided the accompanying picture of David in a mask, says producers worked hard to ensure Larry David would feel safe with the show's coronavirus protocols. "The fact that Larry is back on set is a tribute to classic writers syndrome We already wrote the season; we did the hard part," says Schaffer. "So, let’s do the fun part! If we hadn’t already written the new season, there’s no way we would have done it. But we don’t want to sit on these scripts for even longer. So then it became a question of, how do we do this in the safest way possible? For Curb, our protocol is just above and beyond what is required." Schaffer adds: "On Dave, we had a guest actor who tested negative a bunch of times who then tested positive. Our main castmembers were in a scene with him, so we shut down for 14 days. Actor to actor, when they’re not wearing masks and you’re doing a scene, the actor is a contact and the show shuts down. Every show is different, but Dave is a show with a small cast and a limited budget, so we don’t have a lot of options if our principals have to go into quarantine for 10 to 14 days." Schaffer says he and David decided to set Season 10 after the coronavirus crisis. "We started writing Curb before COVID, and then when COVID happened we had to change some things," says Schaffer. "We had to make the decision about what era we were writing — before, during or after COVID — and the real factor was when we would be premiering. We figured we would be coming out in the fall of 2021 and we didn’t want what we were writing in March of 2020 to be so timely that it would feel dated more than a year later. So we made the decision to set the new season in a post-COVID world. COVID definitely happened and we definitely talk about it, but we were assuming that Biden would win and that things would be better by the fall of 2021. COVID is in the rearview mirror, but it happened. And Larry (the character) has opinions on all of it. (Laughs.) I can’t tell you which characters got COVID, but I can definitely tell you that we do examine peoples’ behavior during the COVID era."