‘Zen’ And The Art of Deconstructing Television With Garry Shandling

On Oct. 13, 1996, HBO unveiled a new slogan that you all know by heart now: It’s Not TV, It’s HBO.

By then, Garry Shandling already had redefined television not once, but twice.

Now, just two years removed from Shandling’s death at age 66, we’re slowly moving on from the era of autobiographical sitcoms that he first revolutionized three decades ago. In 2018, we’re nostalgic for times before that even, with Amazon’s The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel celebrating the early 1960s Greenwich Village scene, and Showtime’s I’m Dying Up Here glorifying the Sunset Strip of the mid-1970s. All of the present-day shows about comedians starring comedians as versions of themselves have come and gone, with the exception of Crashing on HBO, which benefits from the guiding hand of Judd Apatow, who wouldn’t have become the comedy godfather he is today without first learning at the feet of Shandling.

Apatow pays tribute to his show-business father with a new two-part four-and-a-half-hour documentary on HBO, The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling.

No matter what you may have thought about Shandling at the time, or how your thoughts may change upon watching the documentary, his unyielding effort to present the truest version of himself onstage and onscreen resulted in two of the most innovative and influential TV comedies of all time: It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (Showtime, 1986-1990; with reruns on FOX, 1988-90) and The Larry Sanders Show (HBO, 1992-1998).

During the 1980s stand-up comedy boom, there was a simple formula to make a hit sitcom: buy a stand-up’s act, then write a fictional house and occupation around it. It was that simple. Roseanne Barr’s “domestic goddess” routine got explored in depth with the Conner family on Roseanne. Tim Allen became Tim “The Toolman” Taylor on Home Improvement. Amid this wave came crashing Garry Shandling, who played himself as a stand-up comedian, and broke the proverbial fourth wall not only to talk to us at home, but also to show the studio audience and allow them to interact with the plot.

Shandling winked to the camera light years before The Office, Parks and Recreation and Modern Family made a bad habit out of it. And his producers and writers went on to become original writers on The Simpsons, writers/producers on Seinfeld, and dozens of other shows.

And Shandling’s show was the first cable series to break through the Cable ACE wall to receive Primetime Emmy recognition in 1988, with two episodes nominated for comedy writing, and Gilda Radner honored as a nominee for her guest-starring performance in another episode.

Even before co-creating his first semi-autobiographical sitcom, though, Shandling had demonstrated a keen eye for self-parody. At only 36, he starred in a mock 25th anniversary special of his own talk show for Showtime, and convinced late-night king Johnny Carson to make a cameo in it.

Shandling could have been the next Carson.

In fact, he had long dreamed of replacing Carson as host of The Tonight Show. But when the opportunity came in the form of a permanent guest-hosting gig in the late 1980s, Shandling already had his professional hands full with his own sitcom. He turned down the gig, as well as two more offers for 12:30 a.m. shows from CBS and NBC while the late-night wars raged in 1992-93. Instead, he created a world where you could imagine why he would both love and loath that life, all at the same time. It wasn’t Garry Shandling. It was Larry Sanders. It wasn’t TV. It was HBO.

In a 2011 interview with the Archive of American Television, Shandling said he first experimented with the medium in his first Showtime stand-up special in 1984, in part influenced by Woody Allen’s monologues to camera on film. “I think it has to do with my interest in deconstructing life,” Shandling said then. “You can’t walk around in life constantly deconstructing it, but you can on TV.”

By tearing down the walls that separate the actors from the audience, and the scripted lines from the real emotions behind them, he kept discovering more beautiful and lasting moments.

When Radner appeared on his Showtime sitcom, he recalled: “You take a really truly emotional moment like that, a woman with that kind of heart, being on the precipice of dying, and going on a show and saying, ‘Garry, I have cancer. What’s your excuse?’ on camera. That’s what you want to, god love her, explore. That’s what you want to explore. Let’s do a show about this.”

So when another episode found Shandling’s character appearing on a morning talk show, he realized with the help of his longtime friend and acting coach, Roy London, that the talk show setting provided so many more human stories and emotions to explore. That’s why he made Larry Sanders. A show about a man who struggled to be liked and loved, but never wanted to seem to struggle. With realistic talk-show segments and fly-on-the-wall single-cam scenes backstage. With moments both light and heavy in the same episode. And protagonists you weren’t always sure you should root for.

“It was never about a guy who hosts a talk show. Some people say it’s about a talk show. Well, that’s OK, because that’s the commercial veneer of it. But that’s where the writers room got tough, because I would walk in and say, ‘What’s it about?’” Shandling said in 2011.

“That show really became a lab for a study of human behavior.”

Even more than the 18 Emmy nominations (and one win), the lessons of Larry Sanders taught other showrunners and creators to embolden their own television series with more layers of emotional truth.

So The Sopranos wasn’t about the Italian mafia, but rather a father struggling with his place in the world and within his own New Jersey family. Breaking Bad wasn’t really about meth, but rather about how far a husband and father would let himself go in a misguided attempt to secure his family’s future. In a more direct link, 30 Rock was never about TGS, but about the showrunner worried about her own future.

Shandling’s revolution allowed Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David to pitch what, relative to Larry Sanders, feels like a more cartoonish show about the somethings they found amid the usual nothing moments of our day-to-day existence in both Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Moreoever, his shows allowed a future generation of comedians to get even more authentic in exposing their personal points of view, even if it meant fewer laughs per half-hour. Shandling’s success gave cable and streaming networks enough reason to take a chance on Louis CK’s Louie. Then Jim Jefferies’ Legit. Maron. The Jim Gaffigan Show. Mulaney. Dice. Lopez. Tig Notaro’s One Mississippi. Maria Bamford’s Lady Dynamite. Jerrod Carmichael’s The Carmichael Show.

Maybe you loved some of these shows more than others, or even all of them more than Shandling’s. He wouldn’t have it any other way. And besides, you couldn’t have ever loved them if not for his artistic and cathartic breakthroughs.

Sean L. McCarthy works the comedy beat for his own digital newspaper, The Comic’s Comic; before that, for actual newspapers. Based in NYC but will travel anywhere for the scoop: Ice cream or news. He also tweets @thecomicscomic and podcasts half-hour episodes with comedians revealing origin stories: The Comic’s Comic Presents Last Things First.

Watch The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling on HBO GO