He point-blank refused, begged the author not to talk to people who knew him … and eventually relented. Making the first authorised biography of the Seinfeld and Curb creator was no mean feat

Emperor of Nothing: The Making of Larry David might be the most begrudgingly authorised biography ever written. The story of how author Blake J Harris convinced the comedy titan to “tolerate” him begins, of all places, at Fox News.

It was 2020 and Harris’s second book, The History of the Future: Oculus, Facebook, and the Revolution That Swept Virtual Reality, had been published the previous year. Palmer Luckey, the Oculus founder, was “fired for being a Trump supporter” and Harris, anything but a Trump fan, simply reported the facts. Speaking on the phone from his home in Colorado, he explains: “My book ended up doing well because I was all over rightwing media, as they loved having me on. I was the liberal journalist who exposed the truth about how conservatives were treated in Silicon Valley.”

The Seinfeld creator went from luckless standup to multi-millionaire – but what’s his secret?

Larry David agreed to this authorised biography with a five-word email: “Oh Jesus. If we must.” As Blake J Harris tells it, the comedy writer has always been adept at finding reasons not to do something, or to stop doing it, even when there’s nothing to fall back on. As a peppery standup in 1970s New York, David was notorious for storming off stage if the audience displeased him. He walked out of his first TV job, on the Saturday Night Live clone Fridays, because “I stunk.” He twice quit Seinfeld, the sitcom he co-created in 1989, over meddling by NBC executives and fantasised about the network giving him an excuse to leave for good. In 1992, just before it became the biggest show in America, he told friends, “Honestly, I would rather spend a year in prison than do another season of Seinfeld. It would be peaceful. Nobody would make me write anything.” He was only half joking.

David’s career proves that it is in fact possible to be immensely, groundbreakingly successful without ever displaying great ambition. Growing up in Brooklyn amid a boisterous extended family, Lawrence Gene David loved baseball and tall tales but, oddly, not making people laugh. “I can’t recall him ever saying a funny thing,” remembers his older brother Ken. After a spell in the army reserve, he drifted through low-effort jobs – limo driver, bra salesman – and dropped out of acting school, partly because his classmate Jeff Goldblum showed him what a real actor looked like. “Most of the time I was just waiting for other people to stop talking so that I could start talking,” he admits.

From Brienne of Tarth in Game of Thrones to the Hot Priest in Fleabag and of course Dr Frasier Crane, we salute the game-changers who boosted later seasons of our favourite series

Welcome. Nice of you to finally join us. Hope it was worth the wait. Yes, sometimes a late addition can improve a drama or comedy so much it becomes hard to imagine the show without them. Not every series gets the casting chemistry spot-on straight away. A select few of our favourite TV characters weren’t even on the show when it launched.

We’ve selected 18 characters whose gamechanging arrival in later seasons lifted the whole show and added to its legacy. Behold the super-subs who came off the TV bench and scored a winner …