Garry Shandling launched in the late ’80s with It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, but he owned the ’90s by way of The Larry Sanders Show, which ran on HBO from ’92 to ’98. I lived through that landmark show. The satirical, self-regarding tone was always stinging and razor sharp and comfortable as fuck. And now Shandling’s gone — abruptly dead from a heart attack at age 66. It’s 4:30 am in Vietnam and I have to try and get at least some shut-eye, having awoken at 1 am and stayed that way for three hours (don’t ask), but this is truly sad news. From the mid-Reagan era to the late Clinton years, Shandling captured and lampooned American culture by marrying it to his own anxieties and neuroses and then tickled it just so. I loved his wit and his somewhat aloof, lonely-guy attitude about things. (Shandling had relationships but never married.) I’m among the few who really loved portions of Town and Country, the commercial disaster in which Shandling played Warren Beatty‘s BFF. (They were offscreen pals back then.) Shandling and Beatty had an appealingly loose bro vibe in that film that made me smile. I’m very sorry Shandling has left so early, but for roughly a 12-year period he held mountains in the palm of his hands.
![](https://hollywood-elsewhere.com/wp-content/themes/amory/patreon-banner.jpg)