Were there awkward pauses before Garry Shandling?
His recent obsession with man-tan aside, Shandling pretty much gets free rides for life in our book. Name any critical darling-comedy of the last decade ("Arrested Development," "Freaks and Geeks," "The Office"), and you can almost guarantee it owes some debt of gratitude to "The Larry Sanders Show," which stands as a more or less undisputed line separating neo-comedy from everything that came before, breaking the fourth-wall convention, ditching the laugh track and generally stirring the pot.
For "Not Just the Best of the Larry Sanders Show," a definitive DVD package of the mock-doc about a struggling, miserable, self-obsessed late-night TV host, Shandling started with 23 of his favorite episodes from the show's six seasons, and then added eight more hours of addictive footage: Cast interviews, chats with the likes of Sharon Stone, Jon Stewart and Alec Baldwin, deleted scenes with Jeffrey Tambor and Rip Torn, and more.
written on Monday Jul 2, 2007
conversation,
awkward pause,
dvd.
