Larry David on Bringing Back Curb Your Enthusiasm: "What the Hell?"

It's like he never left.

Curb Your Enthusiasmmaestro Larry David -- along with castmates JB Smoove, Jeff Garlin and Susie Essman -- took the stage at the Television Critics Association summer press tour in Beverly Hills Wednesday to kinda sorta explain the show's six-year hiatus and what to expect. Why bring it back now? someone asked. Well, simple.

"Why not? I'm a miss-er, so to speak," David said, sounding exactly like the Larry David you know from the series. "I don't really miss things or people that much. I was missing these idiots," he said, referring to his band of misfits. "So I was like 'What the hell?'"

Welp. Nobody could ever accuse David -- or his comedy -- of being overtly complicated.

Curb Your Enthusiasm FINALLY Has a Premiere Date

Shocking no one, David said that real-life Larry David and Curb Your Enthusiasm Larry David are pretty much -- you guessed it -- the same person. Executive producer Jeff Schaffer, who called David a "neurotic Superman," said the writing process is a lot of, "Larry comes in the office and says, 'This thing happened, and I should have said this,'" and well, there you go. To let David tell it -- which the reporters in the room gladly did on a variety of topics (including the fact that he's distantly related to Bernie Sanders, which will be revealed in an upcoming episode of PBS' Finding Your Roots) -- lines between his life and the show are really, really blurry.

"I'll write something down," David said, "and people are like, 'Ooh, ooh! Did I just give you something?' No, you didn't. Shut up."

Reporters at the Beverly Hilton got treated to a montage of scenes, and apart from what seems like a bombast of high-profile guests -- among them Elizabeth Banks, Bryan Cranston, Jimmy Kimmel, Lauren Graham, Nick Offerman, Nasim Pedrad and more -- Curb Your Enthusiasm will find Larry doing what he always does, i.e. screwing up and getting thrown out of places. Larry has a fight with a plastic tub of liquid soap while in the shower; he argues with Portlandia's Carrie Brownstein over her not coming to work because she was constipated; Larry tells a woman at a funeral that her crying was too loud; Larry appears on Judge Judy, suing a Ms. Shapiro for stealing a ficus plant. "Judge Judy is in my ex-wife's family, so I knew her," he said. Again, not that complicated. Same thing for the writing process and well, the timbre of the series itself.

"Nothing changed. It was the exact same process," he said. "I had trouble in the first take -- I thought, 'Jesus, I lost it.' I've gone through every season not thinking I had 10 episodes." And yet, the neurotic Superman apparently figured it out, and here we are. You were expecting something different?

Curb Your Enthusiasm Season 9 premieres Sunday, Oct. 1 at 10/9c on HBO.