Seth Rogen smiling wide in The StudioImage via ©Apple TV / Courtesy Everett Collection
By
Thomas Butt
Published 1 minute ago
Thomas Butt is a senior writer. An avid film connoisseur, Thomas actively logs his film consumption on Letterboxd and vows to connect with many more cinephiles through the platform. He is immensely passionate about the work of Martin Scorsese, John Ford, and Albert Brooks. His work can be read on Collider and Taste of Cinema. He also writes for his own blog, The Empty Theater, on Substack. He is also a big fan of courtroom dramas and DVD commentary tracks. For Thomas, movie theaters are a second home. A native of Wakefield, MA, he is often found scrolling through the scheduled programming on Turner Classic Movies and making more room for his physical media collection. Thomas habitually increases his watchlist and jumps down a YouTube rabbit hole of archived interviews with directors and actors. He is inspired to write about film to uphold the medium's artistic value and to express his undying love for the art form. Thomas looks to cinema as an outlet to better understand the world, human emotions, and himself.
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The television titan, HBO, was merely a cable channel that played movies fresh from theaters and a host of comedy specials and boxing matches back in the day. Everyone knows that The Sopranos, The Wire, and Deadwood transformed HBO into a home of TV excellence, a brand synonymous with the artistic evolution of the medium in the 2000s. However, these shows did not lay the foundation for HBO's foray into original programming. One of their first scripted shows, The Larry Sanders Show, was an inventive satire about show business whose influence remains as pervasive as ever before, as evidenced by the dawn of a new biting showbiz satire, The Studio, on Apple TV.
The Larry Sanders Show, starring and co-created by the late stand-up Garry Shandling, proved that episodic television could ascend to unforeseen creative heights and break the rigid formula of sitcoms. Running from 1992 to 1998 across 6 seasons and 90 episodes, the series, about a fictional host and the eponymous late-night show, blurred the line between absurdity and documentary, as the entertainment world often plays like a broad comedy.
Garry Shandling Revolutionized Sitcoms With 'The Larry Sanders Show'
Garry Shandling and Rip Torn in The Larry Sanders Show.Image via HBO
Garry Shandling, who was so successful as the titular troubled and gossip-prone late-night host that it's easy to inadvertently refer to him as "Larry Sanders," knew all the ins and outs of show business. After writing for sitcoms like Welcome Back, Kotter and Sanford and Son, Shandling pivoted to the stand-up scene in the lucrative position of being a recurring guest host for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Now in the public spotlight on the most prestigious stage for comics, he made his big leap as a showrunner and TV lead in his fourth-wall-breaking anti-sitcom, It's Garry Shandling's Show, which laid the groundwork for the meta commentary and manipulation of the form in his HBO series.
Shandling was such a capable talk-show host that he was frequently recruited to helm a real-life program, notably when NBC offered him the job to replace David Letterman as host of Late Night. However, he remained loyal to Larry Sanders. Considering that The Larry Sanders Show was the apex of his talents and quirky sensibilities, this was certainly a wise decision. Where most artists would've turned the backdrop of the late-night world into pure farce, Shandling's understanding of this milieu made the series feel authentic. You could register that this show, co-created by Dennis Klein, was envisioned by people who have been through the ropes, giving it an air of importance and cultural relevance.
HBO's 'The Larry Sanders Show' Exposed the Absurdity of Hollywood
The frequent use of videotape to capture the show-within-a-show enhances the documentary-like nature of Larry Sanders, making you forget that you're watching a biting satire on this entire model of entertainment. The show's verisimilitude is aided by its array of real-life stars playing themselves sitting next to Larry as guests — including Norm Macdonald, David Spade, Bob Saget, Catherine O'Hara, Robin Williams — all of whom bring their familiar screen presence and comedic energy to the screen as fictionalized versions of themselves.
Everything you need to know about Garry Shandling is crystallized in his creation of this formative concept and performance as the titular host. From Steve Allen through Jimmy Fallon, late-night hosts are naturally charismatic and effortlessly suave and in on the joke, but Larry Sanders was peculiar in his delivery and rapport with guests and the audience, almost like he was on the verge of an embarrassing meltdown live on air. Off the air, he's even more neurotic, committing countless faux pas and enabling the worst tendencies of Hollywood narcissism. The popularity of his competitors, Jay Leno and Arsenio Hall, increased his self-consciousness with celebrities making the rounds of the press tour. Shandling's wry self-deprecation and nervy energy perfectly matched the jittery, unsettling nature of most conversations in the show.
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Posts By Shawn Van Horn 2 days agoLarry's closest confidants during the show's production, his sidekick, Hank Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor), and producer, Artie (Rip Torn), are equally dysfunctional and self-destructive in their selfishness, but their outward expression of cynicism only makes Larry feel smaller. The series is rounded out by a supporting cast of future breakout stars in film and television, including Janeane Garofalo, Jeremy Piven, Mary Lynn Rajskub, and Bob Odenkirk.
The most memorable sequences in The Larry Sanders Show occur during the commercial breaks of the fictional late-night show, where the host and guest awkwardly transition from phony celebrity-talk to authentic tension and deep insecurity that permeates the backstage offices. A highlight moment comes when Robin Williams asks Larry if his performance on the show is up to par with his usual work, only to be upended by the awkwardness of Hank asking the actor/comedian for an autograph. Shandling's comedy thrived in quiet settings, and the hushed talk and whispers between Larry, Hank, and the guests were automatically hilarious because they were conveying uncomfortable emotions while whispering.
'The Larry Sanders Show' Still Has a Massive Influence on Television Today
Garry Shandling and Jeffrey Tambor in The Larry Sanders ShowImage via HBO
The style of anxious, self-deprecating, and cringe comedy is perhaps the most dominant and beloved form of humor in the mainstream in 2025, and it's hard to imagine any of these shows without the groundwork set by The Larry Sanders Show over 30 years ago. Curb Your Enthusiasm, another pitch-black comedy series about an entertainment personality named Larry with neurotic sensibilities, was HBO's proper successor to Larry Sanders, as Garry Shandling and Larry David share plenty of traits in the comedy Venn diagram. The 2000s saw a boom in "anti-sitcoms," shows that gleefully rejected all the sentimentality of the genre. The likes of Arrested Development and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia have a similar postmodern edge and wit that honor Shandling's comedic stylings. While not a true mockumentary, one can certainly identify Larry Sanders' DNA in The Office and Parks and Recreation.
Today, mainstream audiences are as privy to the drama and palace intrigue of the entertainment industry as trade publications. With our knowledge of celebrity feuds, escalating budgets for film productions, and corporate takeovers, it's become harder for artists to satirize the industry. At the time, The Larry Sanders Show felt incredibly revelatory. The Studio, the new satire about filmmaking in the modern age by Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, is formally and comedically brilliant, but its self-awareness about its own subject matter lacks the fly-on-the-wall authenticity of Shandling's series — something that perhaps just can't be replicated today.
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The Larry Sanders Show
Like Follow Followed TV-MA Comedy Satire Release Date 1992 - 1998-00-00 Network HBO Max Showrunner Garry Shandling Writers Garry Shandling, Dennis KleinCast
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