Fifteen and a half years ago I wrote about how much I enjoyed It's Garry Shandling's Show and, well, Shandling in particular. Since that time I have also droned on about how hard it was to watch it in Australia and how great it was to get all episodes on DVD ten or so years ago but how ironic it was that having them all didn't mean I watched them all. Well, lately I have dipped in to the box set and particularly the fourth and final season. It's an interesting season because it features a major change: Garry is joined by a girlfriend, Phoebe played by Jessica Harper, who becomes his wife during that season as well. Garry also dies - close to the final episode but then is resurrected somehow in an awkward last couple of episodes (according to the commentary there was also an actual final episode filmed which was never properly completed, and instead the final episode is a parody of Driving Miss Daisy which to be honest didn't do much for me because I haven't seen the original; it has a farewell awkwardly tacked on to the very end).
It's interesting to hear the commentary on the 4th season episodes from various people who worked on the show (and GS himself) where it's revealed that they thought the 4th season was a dud and that the introduction of Phoebe was a mistake, etc. I think they're completely wrong - to me, Jessica Harper absolutely holds her own with Garry and some of their scenes together (and the few moments when she is on screen by herself or with people other than GS) show her to be a great comedy talent. Listening to those Hollywood guys diminish various elements of the shows and the actors (whose names they sometimes don't recall) makes me like them less and the shows more.
It's also noted in the commentary, and this is self-evident when you watch the show, that a lot of the people who worked on IGSS went on to work on, or somehow have an impact on, The Simpsons and really changed the way that people saw comedy/parody in the late 20th century. You can see some of that stuff being worked out on IGSS.
So then I started watching a few episodes of season 3 and I'm like - what is this!!! Although there is a great episode where Pete is in a bad mood with everyone and Garry sneaks into his house and puts a dream hat on his head and sees that he's dreaming he wishes he was a lawyer and not a shoe salesman. That's a cool. But then there's also a purported live episode covering the Bush-Dukakis election which is just depressing and weird...
Very weird too that Barbara Cason, who plays Garry's mother, died a few months after the show ended. She died of a heart attack, but maybe the weird thing for me is I think she was in her sixties and really just didn't look that old. That happens to me a lot. Laura and I watched Maybe This Time, a film written by Anne Brooksbank and Bob Ellis and starring Judy Morris, Bill Hunter, Mike Preston and about forty other people who were once in Homicide (including Leonard Teale as some kind of Jim Cairns figure) the other night and Jill Perryman is in it, as Judy Morris' mother, bemoaning being 53 and I'm just somewhere in my mind really confused about whether that's old or not, though of course since the whole film revolves around Judy Morris being perplexed about turning 30, her mother is likely to be somewhere around that age and clearly since we're on some level meant to identify with Judy Morris' character and her thirtyness, we're meant to regard someone 23 years older than 30 as old.
But I'm 57 and the older I get the less I am able to understand what particular ages are supposed to 'mean', whereas when I was 20 it was easy, if you were over 30 it was like why aren't you dead already.
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