Second, I've been remembering all the great people that were on The Larry Sanders Show over the years: Jeffrey Tambor, Mary-Lynn Rajskub, Jeremy Piven, Bob Odenkirk, Rip Torn, not to mention the dozens of great guest stars.
Indeed. Sarah Silverman, Janeane Garofalo, Scott Thompson, Penny Johnson, Kathryn Harrold...
On his show Friday, Bill Maher said that Shandling had the most innovative TV comedies of two different decades with
It's Garry Shandling's Show and
The Larry Sanders Show, and I think he has a pretty strong case. We didn't have cable in the '80s so I didn't see
It's Garry Shandling's Show until Fox picked it up in 1988, but, wow, what a contrast it was to everything else on TV. I re-watched the series last year and it still holds up, but it's hard to remember now, after
Seinfeld and
The Simpsons and all that followed, how dumb and formulaic most sitcoms were at that time. On his show Shandling took those lame formulas and dismantled, examined, and reconstructed them into something truly original and, as they say, brilliant. But all the more brilliant in the context of its time.
Shandling of course split
The Tonight Show guest-hosting with Jay Leno for a short time after Joan Rivers left in 1986. IMO Shandling was a much better host than Leno, and the controversial history of NBC late night might have been much different if he hadn't taken the risk of creating his own series. Which was quite a leap of faith; nobody understood his concept of a sitcom, and whoever heard of a series on Showtime, anyway? But he did it and earned a place in TV history. And his
Tonight Show experience would come back to be the basis of his next groundbreaking series.
And since we're on a Star Trek board... William Shatner is now known for cannily playing with his own image and has built a real second career that way. But it wasn't always so. You didn't know: Was he in on the joke, or did he take himself so seriously he didn't know there was a joke? The first time I saw Shatner do something where he showed a sense of humor about his own image was an early 1992 episode of "Larry Sanders," while Shatner was doing the very serious and earnest
Rescue 911. It's a short scene and it's voice only (Shanter is on a speaker phone) but it made me realize, OK, he may actually get it.
