it's garry shandling's show season 4

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. 

dealing with stuff

I mean seriously I have always been this way, at least, since the early 70s. I accumulate stuff and I can't see how it is actually cumulatively detritus. Very probably my desire to accumulate stuff (which feels more like a desire to not get rid of stuff and/or to protect it) controlled my destiny eg I am a historian dedicated to physical (usually paper-based) sources and I comprehensively reject the idea that the whole story can come from digitised (mediated) materials. For me, even the extremely undeniable advantage of (for instance) streamed music in terms of storage is outweighed by the fact that I don't trust it to give me the full picture/experience/context. 

So, I am presently digging through some boxes retrieved from under-the-house at Lorraine. They are full of media (cassettes, videotapes, small print publications, letters etc) that go back up to 40 years, to my very early adulthood. A lot of things in here that at one stage formed major enthusiasms, things I pored over and adored, then stored. There are also a lot of things that I suppose I didn't process or value quite as much, so I filed them away ('filed' is too generous a word). Some examples: 

I have always loved the work of Al Larsen. His band Some Velvet Sidewalk are that most unusual beast, a group that just got better and better (from an excellent beginning) and then kind of blew up (OK I just looked at discogs, this tape/booklet combination has been sold once, for $30+. My booklet is a little water damaged so I suppose it's worth less. I don't want to sell it. All I then discovered was there's a whole other SVS album I didn't know about, from 1997. I could obtain a copy for $10 plus $40 postage, ha ha, funny but also true. Memo to self: the point here is not to continually add to my storage/acquisitions but to stop accumulating things, even records by bands I really like). 

Changing the subject entirely: in my last couple of years in Sydney so, early-to-mid 90s, I got to slightly know Robert Tilley. If I remember correctly, Robert was doing a PhD in Divinity? at the University of Sydney. Yes, I do remember correctly and here he is. I think we got on pretty well but I always got the sense he was on his own path and indeed he was. He had been a cartoonist in the upper-level alternative press (I'm thinking Nation Review but let's not push memory to its limits) and I am pretty sure, though I don't entirely recall, that I actually scored him $20 cartooning work in some dodgy teen magazine I was involved in in the 90s. His cartoons deserve more recognition than they get. I hope I find more of these Lord of the Cloudses.  

And then there are tons of this kind of thing. Like many up till - I don't know - 2005, 2006? I was in the habit of owning videotapes of 'keeper' stuff, and videotapes that were just on rotation as keep-until-watched-then-tape-over. This was one of those. There was no program called Nomad, I just made up titles for tapes because somehow it made it easier to remember what had what program on it. The tape inside this box at present is labelled 'Garry Shandling Show >March '99>'. I have quite a few videos of the Garry Shandling Show because it is of course one of my favourite shows of all time, but as I think I have observed previously hereabouts, I have the entire show on DVD now and haven't even watched it all lol. 

The one time I'm sort of pleased I did this was when I was living in London in 1986 and taped the debut of Neighbours. My glitchy tape has been on YouTube for ten years now and it's triply interesting firstly because it shows how intensely mind numbing British TV could be; it shows the original version of the debut of Neighbours with the extraordinary nightmare sequence part of which I gather has since become 'non-canon', if that makes sense; and thirdly it shows that there is a sub-sub-subset of geek who is just fascinated by whole sections of broadcast continuity (they have a word for it which I don't remember) of programs that are otherwise available in more pristine formats. That's crazy but I also get it.

But look I think it's time to bite the fucking bullet. It's too late to say I don't want to become a hoarder, I have been a hoarder of sorts for fortysomething years, and the extent of my hoarding is such that I don't even really recognise it as hoarding (and also, like extreme enablers of all kinds, I feel a stab to my heart when someone tells me they threw something arguably culturally valuable away, even worse if it's personally important*). I don't see the junk. I remember when moving to Lorraine Crescent however long ago I thought I can relax and just accumulate material, because I'll never have to move again.** And now here I am in another 'forever home' where I am arguably able to relax and just accumulate. It's a dangerous space to be in! I mean I'm not in whatever the 2020s version of the keeping-every-newspaper stage is, and I have absolutely no problem letting go of things like books which I know exist in libraries etc. 

I think what I need to do is find a way to communicate the pleasure I get from the randomness and potential richness of this stuff - videotapes of old tv shows with ads and news and stuff in them for instance, which is historically interesting because it conveys a time you hadn't thought about since you just generally accepted them in the understanding of 'this is now'. Does that make sense? I am thinking I might set up a website and just start to scan or digitise things and put them up there - then jettison them as I do so. It will be therapeutic I reckon. 

* Personally important to them. I mean, I should mind my own business. 

** Not the reason I wanted to buy a house, except I suppose its's part of having 'agency'. 

garry shandling is dead!

Green Guide, Melbourne Age  13 July 1990 p. 19

I was trying to remember what sort of things I used to write about on this blog in the days before Nancy and Helmi were born and there was no facebook for my hardest-hitting reaction material, and I found this controversial post from 2006 where I dissed Monty Python and praised It's Garry Shandling's Show* although also found that when it came down to it some part of my brain had the same reaction to both (remembering phrases and ideas and being unable to help conjuring them to mind when 'triggered'). 

This also put me in mind (I mention it in the post linked above) of the Sydney Morning Herald reviewer who took the Shandling 25th Anniversary entirely at face value, whereas in fact it's (quite obviously really) a satire of chat shows, post-war American popular culture, and so on. And I thought, well, now I have newspapers.com I can track down that particular issue of the SMH and pull it to pieces a little bit more. Except, bizarrely, I can't find that review in there, at least not by searching 'Garry Shandling"+ "25th anniversary" or even just "Garry Shandling" between 1989 and 1991. When I had the sterling idea (just then) of searching on Gary Shandling instead, all I got was this gem:

Green Guide, Melbourne Age  29 June 1989 p. 30

So there's always the possibility that I have falsified a memory, but also, I might have read it in something other than the SMH, but I have just conflated all print media from that time in my memory to the SMH whereas there was probably a 'shit-ton' of print media around that I read but don't remember. What I did find was that the SMH reviewers - I was living in Sydney then and that's what I would have been reading by the way - were extremely enthusiastic about It's Garry Shandling's Show, unanimously and constantly, and were all bemoaning the fact that it was being shown at 11:30pm and, just the way indie music enthusiasts were about indie music in the 80s, being all convinced that if unimaginative media mediators gave something imaginative a chance then it would probably not only be hugely successful but also, make society a better place for everyone. I think we have modified our expectations a little more these days (but of course, we don't have Big TV limiting what we can watch, these days). 

I still think Garry Shandling was one of funniest comedians I have ever had the pleasure of delving into on a grand scale, though the work of a man of his generation working in the sphere that he did is going to age badly as was brought home to me a few months ago when I tried to watch his 1984 stand up special Alone in Las Vegas and found it dismally sexist and also, worse (?), dull. Comedy's like that, it can't survive, and I suppose the best comedy is the most responsive and intuitive so that (1) most of it has a use-by date (2) the bits that don't have a use-by date get absorbed into the zeitgeist and become stuff for the next generation of comedians to react against. 

The excellent, just excellent, Judd Apatow documentary about Shandling from 2018 cast a lot of light on his process, though left him nonetheless a bit of a cipher, which incidentally is perhaps what all comedians are, or at least the good ones. The amount of time he spent every day trying to push the envelope was a revelation but also his role as mentor to so many others (so many comedians I adore, too, like Sarah Silverman who is probably the current US comedian most likely to be inheritor of his mantle) was inspirational. Of course, not to put too fine a point on it, the whole defining moment for GS the man was the death of his brother, Barry, when they were both children (which now makes me feel weird when I think about the 'Dancing Barry' interlude in one of my favourite It's Garry Shandling Shows). 

Look despite all evidence to the contrary I stopped being a hardline proselytiser for things I liked lo-o-ong ago, about the same time I stopped believing in the canon, and I'm super content to hear about what you like but I'm not going to try to make you like what I like, and for all that there's no crime in enjoying something just because you do - it doesn't have to be current and if you (I) understand the context and no-one else does, that's to your (my) advantage. 

By the way, have you watched everything Stewart Lee has ever done? Because you really should. 

*I actually think there are still some eps of IGSS I still haven't watched, and I do have the full DVD set (it made me appreciate that the season Channel 9 showed in the early 90s, season 2 I think, was really superior to Season 1 when the show took quite some time to hit its stride - no surprises there). 

tv quiz

Stolen from Wayne. Do you snack while watching TV? Very rarely. But I will eat dinner watching tv. What is your favourite TV show? Of all time - It's Garry Shandling's Show (though I'm having trouble getting through the box set). Currently - Big Love, Mad Men, Community, Doctor Who. What TV show makes you run to change channels? Sport. Hey Hey It's Saturday. How do you view your TV guide: online, on-screen, newspaper, magazine, other? 'Where's the fucken Green Guide? This is last week's.' Have you ever been surveyed for your TV-viewing habits or do you know anyone who has been? Yeah in the 70s. Do you watch TV news and/or current affairs regularly? News, 7:30 report, the first twenty minutes of Q&A. Do you watch any TV “soaps”? (Truth please, even if it is embarrassing.) Neighbours What other series shows do you try not to miss? Well I'm excited Rush is coming back on. Three more sleeps. Hope it finally jumps that shark. Any previous series or shows you really liked? Of course, I'm 45. Do you have pay TV or are the digital channels enough? They're not enough, but do I want to pay a thousand dollars a year for repeats of (tries hard to think of some generically uninteresting tv show from yore) The Wacky Races? Do you only watch certain TV shows online? Very occasionally try i-view. Do you regularly use services like ABC catch-up or other online replays? What did I just say? Pay attention. Do you ever pay any attention to the adverts? I like the coffee break ad and the AMI 'what about me' ad. I don't endorse or use either of these products. Do you multi-task while watching TV & if so what else are you doing? Sometimes read or draw. Is there a TV show that makes you laugh out loud? Community Have you ever said no to a social invitation to stay at home and watch TV? (Truth again please.) Mind telling us what the show was? No doubt, though not for a long time. Do you record TV shows & if so why and how (VCR, DVD recorder, TIVO, laptop, etc.)? Nope Least favourite TV personality/actor/character? I don't really pay attention any more. Most popular TV personalities/actors/character? Who cares. They're all a bunch of wastrels and bludgers. Have you ever seen anything really memorable on TV (not news/events – made for TV drama, etc.)? Yeah the Den and Angie argument on Eastenders late 1986 where the window washer kept barging in. Also one time on Neighbours in the early 90s Jim pointed to the toaster and the toast popped up and Paul was balancing a spoon on his nose. Do you prefer TV series or stand-alone shows? Series. Is there a specific show you find yourself recommending over and over? Community, it would seem, judging by the above.