I know everyone has been waiting with baited anticipation for my post on The Larry Sanders Show (haha, just kidding, I think I know like one other person who has even seen any of it), so here goes! Wait no longer, friend.
The Larry Sanders Show starred Garry Shandling as a late-night talk show host, and ran from 1992-1998 (yes, my Wikipedia bookmark works!). It covered the filming of the show but was mostly about backstage details and Larry's life. He has a sidekick, Hank, played to creepy D-list perfection by Jeffrey Tambor, and a producer/hetero life partner named Artie, played by the brilliant and inimitable Rip Torn. The celebrities that show up on Larry Sanders are too vast to mention, but the regular cast includes plenty of familiar faces (Janeane Garofolo, Jeremy Piven, Wallace Langham, Mary Lynn Rajskub). The Larry Sanders Show was also where a lot of big behind-the-scenes names built their resumes, including Judd Apatow and Steve Levitan. This is just to show you that in terms of comedy quality, this show isn't essing around.
Larry Sanders was the original Entourage. In fact, it's a lot like Entourage except without the homophobia and the boobs and the terribleness and the (mostly useless unless adorable counts as useful) Turtle. You've got Vince (Larry), E (Artie), and Drama (Hank). There's even a perfect asshole Ari-ish agent played by Bob Odenkirk. What I mean by this is that the show deals very heavily with the showbiz machine (and television and handling the networks in particular), what it's like being a celebrity and having relationships (be they work or friend or romantic, with regular people and with other celebrities), and with the immense amount of ego coddling that can go into being the person who does the least amount of work with the most amount of benefit. Entourage has covered all of these topics (substitute "network" for "movie studio"), but the problem with that show is that, even when it was good, it felt too much like an inside joke. Also, sometimes the entire plot hinges on "Will someone get some really special, expensive thing/vacation/pussy?" and that is boring and no, not aspirational. I would rather see a celebrity pretend to have been to rehab in order to get out of being embarrassed and then develop an actual addiction and have to be guided through detox by Roseanne any day.
