Doesn’t the fact that Judd Apatow‘s The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling (HBO, 3.26 and 3.27) runs four and a half hours…shouldn’t that fact alone warrant special interest among Shandling fans, of which there are still many? I loved Garry’s angst, his depressive personality, his low self-esteem…I’m talking worship here. But I have to say I liked Shandling in his 40s and 50s better than the older version. His hair, for instance. Shandling had great wavy follicles in the ’90s but was down to a tennis-ball cut after Obama got elected. And his eyes got smaller — they were big and expressive in his 40s but slitty and beady in his 60s. And I don’t know about that Zen thing he got into, and I’m saying this as a former Bhagavad Gita guy. Garry once wrote “you don’t need to be anything, you can just be.” The only people who say or think that are filthy rich or completely devoted to abstinence and poverty, and Shandling wasn’t among the latter. The poor guy died of a heart attack on 3.24.16, at age 66. If there’s anything beyond death, Garry is surely part of it now, dispersed into a trillion particles of consciousness or possibly transformed into a perfect smile.