Review: Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show
I can’t pinpoint the exact moment when I realized that Larry Sanders was the best comedy show on television, ever. But I do know that it is true. I think I first became aware of this universal truth near the end of the show’s run, around 1996 or 1997, when I managed to watch the entire series without much trouble thanks to the relentless rerun policy of HBO.
What can I say about Larry Sanders? If you haven’t seen it, then your life is that much grayer than it could be. It had that vibe you get when you’re playing the piano and your fingers just happen to strike the best sounding chord ever. Or you’re playing tennis and you aren’t overthinking things and hit the most incredible shot you’ll ever hit. At that point you sit back and think, well, that was a moment of greatness I should savor, in case it’s the only one I ever experience. I’m not kidding, Larry Sanders was just like that.
So it’s long been a source of deep suffering that only the first season has been released on DVD. (And frankly, the character of Larry’s wife is so uninspiringly obnoxious that there’s some definite suffering involved in watching that season anyway.) There’s been a lot of speculation about why there haven’t been any other releases, among them the idea that all the musical guests are complicating the licensing process, or the ridiculously acrimonious lawsuit that was pending between Garry Shandling and Brad Grey. (Can I just say for the record: Brad Grey is a hangnail on Satan’s littlest toe.) But regardless of the reasons, the world has remained cruelly deprived of a DVD compilation of the entire series. And for chrissakes, you can buy the full run of freaking MacGyver, how is it possible that Larry Sanders remains incomplete?
But at last, last year I found out (thanks to Lifton over at WFW) that Shandling had finally crossed some kind of Rubicon and was putting out another DVD. I finally got it for Swami for Xmas, and now that we’ve watched the whole thing I can give it a proper review. Not to be deliberately turbid, but here are all the adjectives I could use to describe it: good, bad, great, transcendent, disturbing, depressing, essential, heart-wrenching, and completely awesome. I could come up with a few more if I thought about it a little longer, I’m sure, but I doubt the exercise is helping any of you understand what I mean.
What’s the big deal? Well, this is by all accounts the last DVD we’re ever going to get, so that automatically casts a poignant light over everything. It’s bad enough when great things come to an end, but far worse when someone tells you that you’re not even going to be able to experience the whole of the greatness again. (And here I must mention the travesty that it’s not for lack of technology, or some kind of tragic force majeure, that’s keeping us from seeing this stuff—after all, the laws of physics have permitted us to view any episode of MacGyver we might desire.) True, with this four-disc set you get over thirty of the episodes, many of them with deleted scenes and some with commentaries, but dammit I want them all.
Nevertheless, this is one fine set. Of course some fantastic episodes are left out, but a damn lot of great ones are included. You also get several audio commentaries, individual interviews with just about all of the cast, lots of deleted scenes, and a few incredibly weird interviews that Shandling did recently with some of the people who guested on the show. (These are weird mostly because Shandling appears to be the single most neurotic and uncomfortable person on earth, although he’s also one of the funniest goddamn people I’ve ever seen in an off-script situation.) And the fourth disc is a huge amount of material just about the final episode, which is all well worth it. The only disappointing thing I found, besides the fact that some of the cast come across in their interviews as not very bright, or self-absorbed, or sometimes both at once, was that the reunion with Shandling, Jeffrey Tambor, and Rip Torn was a heavily edited letdown—after watching the three of them kick ass all over the place in the show itself, I was hoping for something more there. (Geeky sidenote: Before I ever saw Larry Sanders I already knew of Tambor from Max Headroom, man did I love that show.) If it’s possible, this DVD set has actually caused me to become an even bigger fan of Larry Sanders now than I was before.
But I hope I don’t come across as insane when I argue that there’s something far more important to be gained from this DVD than just having a bunch of the episodes handy at last. There’s a larger message to be grasped that addresses my earlier metaphor of that perfect piano chord or tennis shot. As you learn about the process of making the show through the audio commentaries and the interviews with cast, and as you learn a little more about Shandling through the interviews he did with various friends, you are invited to face an essential fact about human achievement: It’s never easy. Even that piano chord wasn’t actually easy, considering the hours of playing, listening to music, training of muscle memory, and all of the other factors both mundane and important that made it possible for your fingers to hit those keys at that precise moment. It wasn’t easy to make that show, to write jokes that are still funny today, to create and inhabit characters that seem so perfectly real, to stick cameramen in closets and on rollerblades to get shots that make it feel like you’re in the room when it’s all happening. It wasn’t easy for Tambor to be Hank Kingsley, or Torn to be Artie. (Well, it was probably easier for Rip, but still not all the way to truly easy.) I admit I’ve never watched recent shows like the Office, which also purport to be showing you real or realistic people and situations, but I doubt they would be possible without the groundbreaking work of Larry Sanders to build on. And it was work, definitely work.
What a great series, truly. I sincerely hope “never” doesn’t really mean never, and we get the full run someday. In the meantime, go get this set (or at least borrow mine) and as Hank says, get ready to have a good time.
But at last, last year I found out (thanks to Lifton over at WFW) that Shandling had finally crossed some kind of Rubicon and was putting out another DVD. I finally got it for Swami for Xmas, and now that we’ve watched the whole thing I can give it a proper review. Not to be deliberately turbid, but here are all the adjectives I could use to describe it: good, bad, great, transcendent, disturbing, depressing, essential, heart-wrenching, and completely awesome. I could come up with a few more if I thought about it a little longer, I’m sure, but I doubt the exercise is helping any of you understand what I mean.
What’s the big deal? Well, this is by all accounts the last DVD we’re ever going to get, so that automatically casts a poignant light over everything. It’s bad enough when great things come to an end, but far worse when someone tells you that you’re not even going to be able to experience the whole of the greatness again. (And here I must mention the travesty that it’s not for lack of technology, or some kind of tragic force majeure, that’s keeping us from seeing this stuff—after all, the laws of physics have permitted us to view any episode of MacGyver we might desire.) True, with this four-disc set you get over thirty of the episodes, many of them with deleted scenes and some with commentaries, but dammit I want them all.
Nevertheless, this is one fine set. Of course some fantastic episodes are left out, but a damn lot of great ones are included. You also get several audio commentaries, individual interviews with just about all of the cast, lots of deleted scenes, and a few incredibly weird interviews that Shandling did recently with some of the people who guested on the show. (These are weird mostly because Shandling appears to be the single most neurotic and uncomfortable person on earth, although he’s also one of the funniest goddamn people I’ve ever seen in an off-script situation.) And the fourth disc is a huge amount of material just about the final episode, which is all well worth it. The only disappointing thing I found, besides the fact that some of the cast come across in their interviews as not very bright, or self-absorbed, or sometimes both at once, was that the reunion with Shandling, Jeffrey Tambor, and Rip Torn was a heavily edited letdown—after watching the three of them kick ass all over the place in the show itself, I was hoping for something more there. (Geeky sidenote: Before I ever saw Larry Sanders I already knew of Tambor from Max Headroom, man did I love that show.) If it’s possible, this DVD set has actually caused me to become an even bigger fan of Larry Sanders now than I was before.
But I hope I don’t come across as insane when I argue that there’s something far more important to be gained from this DVD than just having a bunch of the episodes handy at last. There’s a larger message to be grasped that addresses my earlier metaphor of that perfect piano chord or tennis shot. As you learn about the process of making the show through the audio commentaries and the interviews with cast, and as you learn a little more about Shandling through the interviews he did with various friends, you are invited to face an essential fact about human achievement: It’s never easy. Even that piano chord wasn’t actually easy, considering the hours of playing, listening to music, training of muscle memory, and all of the other factors both mundane and important that made it possible for your fingers to hit those keys at that precise moment. It wasn’t easy to make that show, to write jokes that are still funny today, to create and inhabit characters that seem so perfectly real, to stick cameramen in closets and on rollerblades to get shots that make it feel like you’re in the room when it’s all happening. It wasn’t easy for Tambor to be Hank Kingsley, or Torn to be Artie. (Well, it was probably easier for Rip, but still not all the way to truly easy.) I admit I’ve never watched recent shows like the Office, which also purport to be showing you real or realistic people and situations, but I doubt they would be possible without the groundbreaking work of Larry Sanders to build on. And it was work, definitely work.
What a great series, truly. I sincerely hope “never” doesn’t really mean never, and we get the full run someday. In the meantime, go get this set (or at least borrow mine) and as Hank says, get ready to have a good time.
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