What a funhouse of mirrors that Curb Your Enthusiasm finale was!

You're probably familiar with the sitcom's basic premise: Larry David plays a deeply flawed (one hopes) version of himself.

In the wrap-up of the seventh season, the show really got ingrown.

Larry agrees to helm a reunion of Seinfeld, the NBC sitcom that the real Larry cocreated with Jerry Seinfeld. (It was a show starring comedian Jerry Seinfeld as a comedian named Jerry Seinfeld.)

Curb's Larry got involved in the Seinfeld revival primarily to win back his estranged TV wife, by casting her in a plum role in the reunion.

Here is where it gets so mazy I feel like I should be leaving you a trail of bread crumbs:

Curb Larry became jealous that his Curb wife was getting attracted to Jason Alexander, the actor who played George Costanza on Seinfeld. So Curb Larry drove away Curb Jason so that he himself could play Seinfeld George, a character based, in case you didn't know, on the actual Larry.

So to recap, you have Larry David running off an actor who was playing his actual self playing a character on a show created by Larry David. TV Larry wants him gone so that he can take over playing the TV character based on his actual self. All of this on a show within a show within another show. A show starring Larry David as a guy named Larry David.

Self-obsess much, guy?

No taming this shrew. Like Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, reality TV is all about playing oneself. Which Kate Gosselin always did to the hilt.

She was true to form right through this week's series finale of Jon & Kate Plus 8. She'd deliver long, maudlin speeches to the camera about her selfless devotion to her kids. Then, she'd get sour and snappish as soon as she was forced to actually spend five minutes with them.

At one point, after referring to her home as "the set," she pouted that the show was ending "too soon."

We beg to differ.

As she was saying. . . On the finale of this season's Dancing With the Stars (Donny Osmond? Really? Are you serious?), there was a big glitch. In the middle of footage of judge Len Goodman praising a performance by finalist Kelly Osbourne ("You epitomize what this competition is all about"), the sound went dead and we were left with a sustained frozen image of the back of Miss Piggy's head. Where did Queen Muppet come from?

When the transmission resumed, host Tom Bergeron reintroduced the prior segment so that we might hear Kelly's dignified response: "When he said that I nearly peed myself."

Boy, that was worth circling back for.

Excuses, excuses. TV continues to reach new cultural heights. On the American Music Awards, American Idol runner-up Adam Lambert flavored his coming-out party as a solo artist with bondage choreography, leading one male dancer on a leash, vigorously pumping his hips inches from another's face and planting a From Here to Eternity kiss on his keyboard player, Tommy Ratliff.

When ABC edited out some of that footage from its West Coast feed, Lambert spent days cycling through the seven stages of rationalization, from outrage ("That's discrimination!") to amnesia ("I forgot I was on TV").

A simple "Oops, my bad" would have sufficed.

Neigh sayer. Some mornings when I just can't stand the grim assault of the news on my kitchen TV, I'll click over to a VHF channel with a soothing lineup of vintage shows.

This week, I saw an episode of Mr. Ed from 1961 with guest star Richard Deacon as a psychiatrist who becomes alarmed when Wilbur asks to hold their sessions in a barn.

Don't recognize Deacon's name? The late character actor, born and bred in Philadelphia, is perhaps best known as Mel Cooley, Morey Amsterdam's punching bag on The Dick Van Dyke Show.

By the way, Carl Reiner, who created the Van Dyke sitcom, a TV show about a TV show, based the lead character, Rob Petrie, on himself and his experiences writing for Your Show of Shows, another TV comedy.

Maybe the medium hasn't come so far.

Contact staff writer David Hiltbrand at 215-854-4552 or dhiltbrand@phillynews.com. Read his recent work at http://go.philly.com/

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