No Flipping! The Larry Sanders Show on DVD
One of the first full-season-of-a-TV-show DVD sets that I ever purchased was Season 1 of The Larry Sanders Show, released back in 2003.
After having risen to prominence as a stand-up comedian in the 1970’s & 80’s, Garry Shandling became a fixture of late-night television as a regular guest host for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. In 1985 he created It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, which ran on Showtime through 1990. (I have heard that It’s Garry Shandling’s Show is a magnificently bizarre, surreal adventure in television, although I have never seen a minute of it. I live in hope of an eventual DVD release!)
In 1992 Shandling created The Larry Sanders Show for HBO. Sanders was a sharp satire of the world of late-night comedy which Shandling knew so well, and was notable for including various celebrities (actors, comedians, and musicians) in each episode, poking great amounts of fun at their public personas. The show was also notable for its look, which mixed footage shot on video (the segments of the show which chronicled Larry Sanders’ late-night talk-show) with footage shot on film. Nothing like this had ever been done for television before.
The comedy is powerful and brutal, and revels in awkward moments and painful situations. (In this way it can be seen as a direct forerunner of the original British version of The Office.) And yet, the beauty of the show is that you can’t help but fall in love with the show’s central trio: the neurotic Larry Sanders, the clue-less and self-absorbed side-kick Hank, and the fiercely loyal and astonishingly profane Artie, the show’s producer. A great number of talented comedians and actors also did great work in supporting roles: Janeane Garofalo, Penny Johnson (Sherry Palmer on 24 and Kassidy Yates on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine), Jeremy Piven (Entourage), Mary Lynn Rajskub (Chloe on 24), Sarah Silverman, Bob Odenkirk, Scott Thompson, Wallace Langham, and many many others.
I discovered The Larry Sanders Show fairly late in its run. My parents taped many of the episodes of the last few seasons for me when I was away at college. So I was thrilled when Season 1 was released, as I finally had a chance to watch the earlier episodes that I had never seen. I quickly devoured the 13 episodes on the set, and waited patiently for the release of season 2.
And waited.
And waited.
No other season of The Larry Sanders Show has ever been released on DVD. The information I have been able to find on-line seems to indicate that there is an issue with the exorbitant cost of licensing all the music featured on the show.
What we have gotten, though, is the release, last year, of a pretty spiffy “best-of” collection: Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show, featuring 23 episodes selected from the show’s six seasons. The shows are well-chosen, featuring some of the real highlights of the series, including my two favorite episodes: “Everybody Loves Larry” in which Larry suspects that David Duchovny (The X-Files) has a crush on him, and “My Name is Asher Kingsley” in which Hank decides to covert to Judaism.
The set is also replete with extras, including a terrific, lengthy documentary about the production of the series, and tons of interviews with various people involved with the show. The most interesting (and also bizarre) extras on the disc are a series of conversations between Garry Shandling and a number of different members of the show’s cast and notable guest-stars. Mr. Shnadling had apparently not been in touch with most of these people since the end of the show, and decided to use the production of the DVD to reconnect with them, and film what happened. The result is unlike anything I’ve ever seen on a DVD. The conversations are fascinating, intimate, and often extremely awkward and uncomfortable. There is a breakfast with Sharon Stone that I felt like I needed subtitles to help decipher the complex dynamic between the two. I should also note Shandling’s long conversation with Jerry Seinfeld. This is the least awkward of all the interviews, as Shandling and Seinfeld appear to be old friends who see one another regularly. Their free-ranging conversation about comedy and their old TV shows is a gold-mine of interesting tidbits, particularly for someone like me who holds both The Larry Sanders Show and Seinfeld up as shining examples of TV greatness.
If you are a fan of the show, this DVD is worth checking out. As for me, I will continue to hope that eventually the many remaining unreleased episodes of this classic TV show will eventually see the light of day, either on DVD, blu-ray, or whatever the format after that winds up being. Hope springs eternal! Maybe someday I’ll also get Andy Richter Controls the Universe on DVD as well…