John P. Johnson, HBO via AP Larry David continues to express the paranoia and social phobias that humans don't otherwise articulate. Click photo for larger image.

When Larry David came back to write the "Seinfeld" finale, he decided to leave his four characters to posterity in a jail cell -- imprisoning them, finally, for being uncaring and self-involved, dangerous to the social order. This was David's closing argument, a twist that enabled the episode to act as a comment on all the celebrated, much-quoted behavior of nine seasons.

Sunday night, in what was officially the finale of the fifth season of David's "Curb Your Enthusiasm" but felt, maybe, like a bigger kind of finale (the episode was called "The End"), Larry finds out he's actually the product of Gentile parents and converts from nettlesome Jew to beneficent Christian. He gives up his kidney to an ailing Richard Lewis, only to discover on the way to the operating room that the private investigator tracking down his birth parents has made an error. A near-death experience finds him on his way to the afterlife, where he's bounced back to Earth after an argument with a heavenly guide (Dustin Hoffman) over the proper system for storing DVDs.

The whole dying process is played as you might imagine Larry David playing it -- the weightiest of occasions undermined by petty arguments. In heaven, Larry is berated by his mother, who is played by Bea Arthur ("Who goes around giving their kidney to people? Idiot!" she greets him), while around his deathbed his loved ones haggle over the Blue Book value of a Prius.

It was David throwing the petty fights in which his show has trafficked, the molehills made into mountains, into heightened relief. His whole conversion to the good in himself, followed by the inevitable going-down-with-the-ship of his innate personality, had that "Seinfeld" finale self-awareness to it, even if nobody was saying that this was the end of "Curb."

True, last season ended in grandiose fashion, too, with David starring in a Broadway production of "The Producers," but visually and contextually this was a further reach -- Larry on a horse in Arizona, Larry hurtling into the afterlife. It didn't entirely work. "Curb" always has been better going for smaller versions of comedic triumph. The show at its best can seem to be about watching David meander from deli to doctor's office to cocktail party, infecting the entire west side of Los Angeles with his obsession and shame reflexes.

In this, "Curb" became influential, a show that not only lent a certain vogue to the idea of improvising dialogue but also tipped off other comic artists that exploring the obnoxious side of show business personality, in real-time, verite style, was the way to go. And so you got Kirstie Alley in "Fat Actress" and Lisa Kudrow in "The Comeback," and both proved that what David did looked deceptively easy.

"Curb" has been criticized this season for having played itself out, although the show essentially has remained unchanged: David fantasizing into his id and producing moments, if not entire situations, pitched to articulate the paranoia and social phobias and comical asides that human beings don't otherwise express.

He's the outside voice where most of us would keep it inside, a fact reflected back at him by a strong ensemble cast that plays this well. Having had its debut during HBO's powerhouse Sunday night lineup, coming on after "Sex and the City," "Curb" seems more naked now as the network's fortunes on the night have changed.

Then, too, the form of the series has become familiar to viewers, and the same thing that happened to George on the later seasons of "Seinfeld" has happened to David on "Curb Your Enthusiasm": The comedy of him comes across as louder and more obvious.

And yet, it can be hard to determine whether "Curb" has changed or the audience has changed around it. In Season 5, as in Season 1, the smaller predicament builds to the bigger one, like the "Curb" of a few weeks ago, in which Larry tries to curry favor with the head of a kidney transplant consortium and ends up stranded at episode's end on a ski lift with the guy's Orthodox Jewish daughter, who panics that she can't be with a man at sundown.

We know the show's biorhythms by now, so an episode like "The Ski Lift" doesn't play as memorably as, say, "The Doll" from Season 2, in which Larry cuts off the hair of a little girl's doll, causing unimagined repercussions. That life should be good but is fraught with tumult at every turn is the place from which each "Curb" starts.

David took this to a more symbolic place Sunday night.

"Curb" was kind of an accident to begin with -- an HBO special David did about returning to stand-up comedy post-"Seinfeld" that blossomed into a series -- so it would not be out of context for the show to depart on parallel terms.

However far his HBO show has fallen off the cultural radar, there's still some kind of touchstone in its complaints.