100 Favorite Shows: #57 — The Larry Sanders Show
“You talk to people on television and they think they’re your new best friend.”
[Disclaimer: Jeffrey Tambor, who played Hank Kingsley on The Larry Sanders Show, was accused by multiple women of forcing himself on them and of sexual harassment acts. More information was reported by Deadline in 2017. Additionally, Jeremy Piven, who played Jerry, was accused by multiple women of sexual assault and harassment in 2017. Reports first came by Ariane Bellamar in a series of tweets and were detailed in full on The Hollywood Reporter.]
Garry Shandling was a highly sought after comedic talent at the turn of the 1980s ito the 1990s. He had his pick of any sitcom or talk show he wanted. Instead, he pushed the medium of television (and comedy) forward with The Larry Sanders Show. Created by Shandling (who starred as Larry Sanders) and Dennis Klein, the series took place at the fictional “Larry Sanders Show” and followed the behind-the-scenes misadventures of the production team. Sanders was the star, but the ins and outs of the studio also featured the series’ producer, Artie (Rip Torn), its announcer/sidekick, “Hey Now” Hank Kingsley, and a collection of writers, agents, interns, and staffers. The Larry Sanders Show ran for six satirical seasons (good for ninety episodes) on HBO, beginning its run in 1992 and wrapping things up in 1998, changing the landscape of television forever along the way.
(No flipping. That is, unless you’re averse to spoilers for The Larry Sanders Show, many of which are present in this essay.)
One of the best television-based personality tests you can give someone is to ask what their mind thinks of when they hear the Pavlovian HBO static sound effect. Some might hear, “You woke up this morning, got yourself a gun.” Some might hear the circus-esque Curb Your Enthusiasm theme. Only the rarest and most specific of people will hear Hank Kingsley’s sultry vibrato speaking, “You see that flashing sign there? That says, ‘Applesauce.’ I’m kidding! It says, ‘Applause.’” That’s how most episodes of The Larry Sanders Show began: with Hank Kingsley cluing the viewer into the episode as any warm-up comic or talk show announcer would. The only difference was that The Larry Sanders Show was not a real talk show.
It certainly felt like it, though, if you were to only watch the talk show segments with the blithe unawareness of who Shandling or Tambor were. Less culturally savvy viewers might be duped into thinking it was “The Larry Sanders Show” and not The Larry Sanders Show in the same way that people who stopped watching SNL when Will Ferrell left might be genuinely invested in some of the stories on Documentary Now!
In spite of the fictional structure of The Larry Sanders Show, it was still grounded in a sense of authenticity to talk shows, thanks in large part to Shandling’s myriad guest host stints on The Tonight Show. For as much as it delighted viewers with the day-to-day buffoonery of the “Larry Sanders” staff, it was just as educational about the various behind-the-scenes elements of production that go into making a talk show.
Every character taught fans some element of the talk show gig and just how many jobs went into producing what could seem fairly easy on a surface level. We see Kingsley forcing himself to find things to do during the day, considering it didn’t take much to memorize a fifteen second intro and play off the guests’ interactions. We see Artie in charge of bumping guests who’d been previously billed to appear when segments ran over time. We see Paula (Janeane Garofalo) (and later Mary Lynn Rajskub’s Mary Lou) keep every ego in check to make sure there were enough guests to bump in the first place. We see the head writer, Phil (Wallace Langham, also known for his role as Dr. Seeker), churn out abysmal ideas for sketches. We see Beverly (Penny Johnson) orchestrate meetings between Larry and network affiliates. We see anniversary specials and pseudo-finales and how they’re used far more for posturing (Jim Carrey always capitalizes on his own career) than for goodwill. The entire series could have served as a syllabus for how a talk show comes onto the air five nights a week throughout the entire year.
We also saw a few different guest hosts throughout Larry Sanders (from Dana Carvey to Bobcat Goldthwait to Jon Stewart). While plenty of guests came by to play themselves and sit down on the couch opposite Larry, it was through the jockeying for guest hosts and 12:30 time slots that much of the celebrity satire was able to compound with the talk show satire. Most of the celebrities Larry encountered could be just as superficial and scummy as he was. Still equipped with plenty of authenticity, these celebs-as-themselves were certainly exaggerated forms of their real world personas.
Take Carvey, for example, the source one of Sanders’ fiercest hatreds. While there are undeniably actors in Hollywood who are as detestable as “Carvey” was on Larry Sanders, it’s not actually Carvey himself. He’s in on the joke and, as a result, it’s a bit telling who wouldn’t appear from the same cuts of comedy (or “market corrections” as Bill Simmons calls them) on the show. That is to say, David Letterman turned up from time to time, but some other hosts of the era didn’t.
This reached an apex when these market corrections were unloaded on the season two episode, “Life Behind Larry.” When the 12:30 slot seems to be up for grabs, a flood of actors call Larry’s office (and David Brenner sends brownies). It’s only Kevin Nealon who takes the initiative to ask Larry in person before he’s relegated to a closing elevator and the complete lack of interest on Larry’s part. He has just as much contempt for all of the performers trying to slide into 12:30 as Nealon did for the “Hans and Franz” sketch, which is outright dismissed as hokey hackery more in the vein of Kingsley than Shandling. Ultimately, it was just amusing to watch the actors poke fun at their own sketch backgrounds.
Would anyone have been a more milquetoast option than Nealon for the slot after Sanders’ show? Yes, of course. That would be Tom Snyder, the eventual choice to succeed Larry in TV Guide after Letterman pretended that Snyder was his heir apparent. Larry should’ve seen through Letterman’s cutting edge (for the time) sarcasm, but instead, he’s too blind to his own deficiencies as a talent scout to realize that Snyder is the most boring pick possible. (Not to mention that not one woman was ever even considered for the 12:30 slot. It was just a cavalcade of white men, each one more standard issue than the last.)
Sanders’ inability to think creatively is what made the character so perfect to be the host of a talk show. With this sharpness equipped for eschewing the true Hollywood Sanders types, Shandling (with all of his sorely missed genius) was able to portray the host as narrow-minded as he was pompous. A total asshole, Larry Sanders pretended to be the kind of guy who cared more for a laugh than for recognition. Yet, he was unable to tell the two apart. Doing great work on his own talk show never mattered so much as getting a trophy or a “Job well done!” for doing so. The man would watch his own show from his living room (or, if he had an unlucky woman over, his bedroom) for the purpose of relishing in the fact that he was on television — never for the purpose of honing his craft.
It was this sense of falsehood that always rang true on The Larry Sanders Show. From Hank’s opening announcement every night (“Live… on tape from Hollywood! It’s “The Larry Sanders Show!”) to Larry’s closing statement in his last episode (“You may now flip”), the entire thing is aggressively phony. It’s not live, it’s on tape. Larry’s not crying, he’s forcing the tears out because that’s what he saw Johnny Carson do when Bette Midler sang him goodbye. Were Carson’s tears fake? Probably not. Were Sanders’? They were as fake as everything about him.
The entire emphasis on “flipping” helped to make Sanders such a traditional figure in the world of talk shows, even though the show was far from it. “No flipping,” he’d say before every faux commercial break on the talk show, suggesting viewers stay on his channel and watch the advertisements, rather than looking for another channel. These days, there’s not really such a thing as flipping, unless you’re endlessly scrolling through a Netflix category that was tailor (read: algorithm) made for you. Ironically, it was The Larry Sanders Show that helped to usher in the loss of the traditional television landscape. The minute Shandling rebuked his own talk show for an HBO satire, the vast ship of television comedy began to tilt into a wave destined for the shore.
For all the specificity that Shandling brought to Sanders and to the show, as a whole, a sizable percentage of the show’s laughs were still derived from its broadest comic creation: Hank Kingsley.
At one point in Home Alone, Kevin McCallister called out to the Wet Bandits, “I’m up here you big horse’s ass!” I never thought much of the insult aside from it seeming to be a relic of the 1990s, as I’d never heard it in common society. But when I watched The Larry Sanders Show for the first time, all I could think of was that Hank Kingsley was the fullest embodiment of that barb. He was the epitome of a horse’s ass.
Emotionally charged insecurity and deep strands of paranoia resided within Hank and they manifested in every decision he made. The former cruise ship entertainer who lucked into a nightly, Ed McMahon-esque network gig thought that he was the most talented comedian on the show (even if he’d never dare say it to Larry for fear of bursting into tears) and, as a result, he built a fan club around himself and did his best to merchandise his catchphrase, “Hey now!” He didn’t realize that his audience often teetered on “lowest common denominator” territory because there was no nuance to Hank or his comedy. Accessible even to people who only understand the catchiness of “Hey now!,” Hank could have never anchored his own show, in spite of his endless lobbying to do so. There would’ve been no identity to it because there was no true identity to Hank Kingsley.
Ultimately, the vibe I got from Hank was that he was someone who was bullied frequently as a child and the way he responded to that treatment was to put up defenses. Over time, those defenses manifested into such crippling insecurity that he couldn’t speak with anyone without thinking they were about to treat him poorly. As a result, his defenses became proactive and he started to be the one bullying others. It makes for a pitiful character, but also for a ton of great humor. After all, Hank wasn’t the king of much, but he was the king of B-stories on The Larry Sanders Show.
While this is where the majority of the broad comedy resided in Larry Sanders, there was a ton of pioneering and influence in the rest of the show. Typically, these advancements into cringe comedy and dryer punchlines that hanged in the characters’ air, rather than being delivered with a rhythm that clearly dictated laughter, would be ascribed to European or Oceanic sensibilities of comedy television. The Larry Sanders Show was made right in the United States, however, and permanently propped Shandling up as one of television’s greatest influencers.
I won’t pretend to fully comprehend the intricate ways in which Larry Sanders changed its menagerie of mediums forever (just as I won’t pretend that I noticed any sort of technological innovations on the show, save for the switch to a multi-cam format whenever Larry sat behind his desk), but I will say that I see a great deal of its influence in the early seasons of The Office and in the plotting of many 30 Rock story lines. Not to mention, Larry Sanders was filled with producers who have gone on to do exceptional things in comedy, including Judd Apatow (who even made a massive documentary about Shandling’s life, entitled The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling) and Maya Forbes (who directed Infinitely Polar Bear).
The show’s greatest producer might have just been fictional, though. That would be Artie, spectacularly brought to life by Rip Torn, who just had the greatest delivery of anyone on the series. (I still think about his belief that Stevie (Bob Odenkirk) was on his way to “Bullshit canyon” and his speedy quip to the talent, “If I hadn’t pissed myself, I’d have shat myself.”) A more palatable kind of “yes man,” when compared to Hank, Artie provided endless support to Larry in the form of obfuscating the network execs (“I don’t follow sports” is his retort to the execs’ statement that Stewart, as permanent guest host, is Larry’s “back-up quarterback”), managing the complaints of his staff (“Do we have to settle this crisis right before we go on the air?” he says to Hank, in what could practically be any episode), and waving his notes to the audience in celebration of a big laugh. Easily the most skilled worker at the talk show studio (aside from maybe Beverly), Artie handled more shit than the Kellogg’s factory’s plumbing system. The endless barrage of complaints and conflicts seems never to phase him, especially from the perspective of Larry — because that’s the perspective we usually get. We almost never see life from the eyes of a producer.
The seminal season four episode, “Arthur After Hours,” gives us exactly that, though. Typically, we see Artie from Larry’s point of view, as a machine of a producer. He’s able to handle any problem that comes their way and he manages to keep Larry on the air well after the execs had set their sights on the fresher, hotter talents in Hollywood. “Arthur After Hours” shifts to Artie’s point of view, though, after he receives the blame for bumping Ryan O’Neill from the show when it was Larry’s decision. The rest of the cast and crew go home for the night as Artie plods around the studio, fed up with the bullshit he was so deft at pretending never got to him. He screams in frustration at the over-sized LARRY letters that rest in front of the show’s band, he drunkenly sings, “I Wanna Be Around,” and he makes friends with the show’s janitor, Nicolae (Elya Baskin).
“We’re the guys pushing the broom,” Artie laments to Nicolae, even if Nicolae doesn’t quite understand the depth of Artie’s Mel Cooley-exacerbated frustration. It almost seems like Artie is prepared to quit the show when he leaves Larry a voicemail filled with intense, Nicolae-sanctioned profanity. The next day, however, Artie returns to the show (with no sign of a hangover) and makes brief amends with Larry, returning the show to its status quo. The kicker (equipped with the always-excellent freeze frame endings) comes when Beverly, who told Artie she deleted his voicemail for Larry, assures Larry that that’s what she told Artie. Larry gives a short laugh and remarks that the voicemail was worse than the ones he’d received in previous years, revealing that this is a regular occurrence from Artie. Once a year, he needs to vent all of his frustrations to prepare him for the next 365 days of shit, like some sort of buttoned-up network Santa Claus. And the viscous insults do not phase Larry.
For all of the Network and The Player sentiments that Artie infused into the show, The Larry Sanders Show really was a new kind of satire. It told the story of the show over the course of ninety episodes, giving us a lens into the behind-the-scenes culture of variety television and occasionally dipping Shandling into that territory, albeit inadvertently.
Ultimately, there’s a clear distinction to be made in Larry Sanders’ conceptions of fiction and non-fiction. When the shooting style shifts to resemble a real talk show and not a behind-the-scenes series, the characters shift, too. Larry and Hank play nice, smiles are plastered on all of the guests like they’re Veep characters at a press conference, and the conversations and musical moments resemble the banal promotional materials typically reserved for NBC, ABC, and CBS.
The real conversations begin when the camera gets up close, sneaking to the side of Larry’s desk and viewing the guests from his point of view. That’s when the spewing vitriol comes out from Sanders and one would almost be inclined to think that Artie is his only true friend with how many bridges he seems intent on burning throughout the state of California. When Larry’s finally on his way out, though, Carrey is more aggressively eviscerating in his honesty about why he accepted an invite to the “Larry Sanders” finale. The traditional elements of Sanders were on the way out, but the time would eventually come for Carrey to fade from the comedy zeitgeist, too.
There is no loyalty in show business. In “Everybody Loves Larry,” when the network reps question Artie about the guests Jon Stewart has for his week-long hosting stint on “The Larry Sanders Show,” they list those who have been booked. They include Zsa Zsa Gabor, Sally Struthers, Charles Nelson Reilly, and Jamie Farr. In the 1990s, these guests are considered washed up, but in the 1970s, that would have been a killer lineup. Eventually, a lineup of Nealon, Carrey, and Carvey would be considered just as washed up as the Gabor/Struthers/Reilly/Farr brigade because in showbiz, there is no appreciation for any work that stars have done before. When Larry is ushered out with an exorbitantly fake celebration, it’s hard not to consider it juxtaposed against how unceremoniously he was dumped by the network heads. For all the work they put into it, the audience had already moved onto Stewart, careless of Larry’s damnation to surefire cultural obscurity. Like Artie said in “Arthur After Hours” when he came to terms with the career he devoted his life to, “All that people remember is the night the chimp grabbed Larry’s balls.” Thankfully, Shandling gave us so much more.
