Curb Your Enthusiasm

Beyond being well-crafted and thoroughly funny entertainment, Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm deals with important and relevant topics and social concerns, often developing an intricate symbolic framework within the context of a single episode. For its subject matter, the “Christ Nail” episode takes on the specter of fundamentalist Christianity and the commercialization and marketing of related religious iconography which should be incongruous with such crass cash-grabbing moves. The episode also examines the line between cultural norms and taboos as they relate to gender roles and identity, spousal tensions, and childhood myths. Larry's foibles when confronted with these issues provide much of the episode's humor.
Larry David's portrayal of himself on the screen is fascinatingly nuanced. He is not particularly likable, yet the audience is (or, at least, this viewer was) led to the belief that his demeanor does not render him deserving of the trouble in which he finds himself. In other words, the problems in his life arise not from his own shortcomings but are visited upon him by forces largely outside of his control.
The theme of this implication — that of outside forces influencing our daily lives — pervades a great deal of the episode. When the angry Jesus is charging at Larry in the hallway wielding the small, wooden cross, he steps on errant, upward-pointing nail (the same one Larry had taken from his father-in-law) and is felled by it once it has lodged itself in his foot. Larry is thus quite miraculously saved by the same “Christ nail” he had previously made a mockery of.

As he said: “You never know when you're gonna need a nail.”

Or a tooth fairy, for that matter.