Garry Shandling is on the phone, and we’re having a Larry Sanders moment.
A Larry Sanders moment, if you’re unfamiliar with television’s finest sitcom, is one where the facade is peeled back and the artifice of show business sits naked before you.
“The Larry Sanders Show,” starring Shandling as the host of a “Tonight”-like talk show, goes about this with a kind of casual, cutthroat glee: In one episode from last year, for instance, Martin Mull, Mike Myers and Tony Danza are all rejected as guest hosts not because they’re no good, but because even their B-list celebrity “threatens Larry.”
Pat Sajak, suitably C-list, gets the nod. Taking the jab like a man, and further blurring the lines between illusion and reality, Sajak is on hand to play himself.
A Sanders moment in real life, however, happens about 20 minutes into an interview scheduled to promote the long-awaited new season, 17 fresh episodes beginning Wednesday (9:30 p.m., HBO). It goes like this:
“Hold on one second,” Shandling says, breaking into a question still in the formative stages. “Kelly!”
With that, Shandling launches into a spiel so skillfully done I’ll barely get a word in.
“You’ll just excuse me. I have another one of these to do. Hold on. OK, go ahead.”
Then, to Kelly again: “Do you have the other one? Oh, God. All right.”
Back to me: “I don’t know how long–what are these, scheduled like every 15 minutes or something? How much time did they tell you? It might be 20.
“I don’t mind. Go ahead. I’m just reacting to someone sticking their head in my door, yelling.”
I am being told, in very polite, indirect, show-bizzy terms–it’s not me, it’s my people–that the interview is over.
I gamely force one last question in–about how a guy who’s slept with Sharon Stone, as Sanders did last season, could go on afterward to get married, as Shandling expects Sanders will do this season–but my heart isn’t in it and neither, clearly, is his.
The funny thing is, I feel honored. That monologue could be dropped directly into a Larry Sanders episode, where the game is manipulation in the name of popularity and fame, and where a smile is reflex rather than reflection of feelings.
On the other hand, of course, it could simply be true that someone from, say, the Dallas Morning News is on the other line.
An entertaining proposition
That’s the genius of the Sanders show. In addition to being riotously and savagely funny, propelled by more great characters than the average night of network programming, it gets you thinking about what’s hiding behind those curtains that Johnny walked through on so many nights.
Like in a real-world workplace (as opposed to one created for television), there’s a staff back there rife with animosities, insecurities and tongues held for the sake of a paycheck.
Arthur, the veteran producer, a master psychologist whose only patient is the show, holds together the fragile concoction of snotty writers, demanding guests and underappreciated support staff.
In the role, Rip Torn barks out orders like a drill sergeant, buoys Sanders’ fragile ego like a doting father, smooths obstacles to the show’s success with all the subtlety of a man pumping grease through a firehose. Cursing and swilling salty dogs with a sailor’s lust, Torn seethes with a barely controlled–and absolutely magnetic–hostility.
Equally good is Jeffrey Tambor, as Sanders’ Ed McMahon-like sidekick, Hank Kingsley. Kingsley’s stew of poutiness and aggression, self-importance and lack of self-knowledge, makes even Sanders seem well-adjusted.
“You know what’s really sad,” Kingsley announces during Wednesday night’s premiere, which partly deals with Sanders’ fascination with the O.J. Simpson trial, “is that people have forgotten the real victims of this crime. I live on Rockingham and my property values have just gone right in the toilet.”
And Janeane Garofalo, as the show’s talent booker, serves as the de facto viewer representative, cutting through all the celebrity hokum she faces with an exaggerated patience that puts the supremely silly behavior in its place.
“This show has always been for me purely an exercise in studying human behavior and learning as an actor and a writer to reflect what human beings really feel and how human beings really cover up their frailities,” says Shandling, a co-creator of the show and an active participant in the writing.
“I don’t feel necessarily that we’re commenting on television. I think that’s an element of it. I don’t necessarily feel that we’re commenting on talk shows and so forth and so on. I think it’s just a comment on reality. It is a way of seeing how we as human beings change our behavior to be liked by others.”
Behind the curtain
Yet in its relentless chronicling of the celebrity pecking order, and its insistence on depicting celebrities cursing and whining when the cameras are off, “Larry Sanders” can’t help but slap the phony grin off of the entertainment world at the same time. Watch enough of it, and a TV show like “Entertainment Tonight” begins to appear a complex enterprise, dense with subtext, not just an adjunct to studio publicity departments.
On the season premiere, for instance, Roseanne is booked as a guest, and Sanders is in a tizzy. She helped him kick painkillers last season, and they ended up dating for “a long time,” Sanders says, “All the way from the Emmys to the People’s Choice,” where Roseanne dumped him for her limo driver.
Sanders decides, just before heading out to do a monologue, to bump Roseanne from the next night’s show because his shrink has convinced him to do what’s right for him. Arthur, peeved at the interference, announces, in his magesterial way, that the replacement is Richard Simmons.
“That’s the best you can do?” Sanders complains.
When Sanders and Roseanne do finally meet–on the show, of course–she tells him she dumped him because “your idea of fun is sitting home every single night watching your own show.”
“Almost everything that we depict would actually happen on a show or has actually happened,” says Shandling, who gained ample experience with such matters during his run as Johnny Carson’s most frequent guest host and heir-apparent for a couple of years in the late 1980s.
But Larry Sanders is not simply a version of Garry Shandling, he says. “Larry is certainly more aggressive than I am, more driven than I am, more show business oriented than I am–and hopefully less self-aware than I am. But I may be wrong and not know who I am at all,” says Shandling.
“I certainly have my neurotic moments. But the neuroses don’t manifest themselves the way they do with Larry, which is his concern with ratings and his concern with how he’s thought of by his peers and his competitors. Mine is mostly just an insecurity about my choices in life, which go a little deeper than purely wondering if I’m getting bigger ratings than Jay or Dave.”
One of Shandling’s choices was whether to follow Jay or Dave, to become Larry Sanders in real life by taking the 11:30 p.m. talk-show slot on NBC or CBS.
“You said something there that is very telling,” Shandling says. ” `I had a chance to be Larry in real life.’ And I think if you look at Larry, that’s not someone you really want to be.”
To top last season, the show will have its work cut out. That year, the program’s third, began with Sanders announcing a fake drug problem to cover up his running off to hole up in Montana. In a meaty irony, he developed a real drug problem during the course of the year.
No story arc like that is planned, says Shandling, though he said something similar to an interviewer at about this time last year, and they are just one-third of the way into the writing.
“Larry is off dating other women and going out with a lot of models and leading a fairly shallow existence in the first half of the season,” Shandling says, “and then he feels very much like Tim Allen and Jerry Seinfeld and Paul Reiser that he should be writing a book.
“So he begins writing a book about his life, which throws everyone into a panic because they don’t know what he’s writing . . . That’s as far as I am.”
The only other thing he’s determined is that the character “will probably end up getting married again at some point. We haven’t discussed to who yet.”
This leads, in a roundabout way, to the Sharon Stone question and to the interview’s petering out.
“I’m on your side,” Shandling says, just before signing off. “If you need anything else, let me know.”
Sure thing, Garry. What was that number again?
