Rise to Fame
NBC wanted him to replace Johnny Carson. He said no. That refusal is the entire Garry Shandling story. He'd guest-hosted The Tonight Show regularly through the mid-'80s, the obvious heir, but walked away to make a Showtime sitcom where he broke the fourth wall for laughs. When NBC came back in 1993 with $5 million a year for Late Night after David Letterman left for CBS, he passed again. Instead he built The Larry Sanders Show on HBO, a fake talk show that earned 56 Emmy nominations across six seasons and quietly rewired how television comedy worked. Curb Your Enthusiasm, 30 Rock, The Office all run through it.
In the Spotlight
He's the comedian every other comedian credits but most audiences never watched. The Larry Sanders Show writers' room became a farm system for a generation of comedy: Judd Apatow was one of the names it put on the map. Shandling himself didn't cash in on that influence. He did scattered film roles (Iron Man 2, Captain America: The Winter Soldier) instead of chasing the leverage Larry Sanders had earned him. Apatow's four-and-a-half-hour HBO documentary The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling won the 2018 Emmy for Outstanding Documentary and argued, persuasively, that a man that funny was also profoundly alone.
Side Notes
His older brother Barry died of cystic fibrosis when Shandling was ten; his parents didn't talk about it or let him attend the funeral. A car accident in the mid-'70s left him in critical condition for two days. He's said both events pushed him toward comedy, though the connection was less therapeutic breakthrough than slow redirect. The other formative disaster was his manager. Brad Grey co-produced Larry Sanders while triple-dipping on commissions and using Shandling's name to broker over $200 million in outside deals. The $100 million lawsuit settled in 1999, but the Pellicano wiretapping trial later put Shandling on the stand to testify that he believed Grey had hired a PI to tap his phones. The guy who spent six seasons documenting Hollywood's fakeness got blindsided by it anyway.
Final Chapter
In 2019, his estate donated $15.2 million to UCLA's David Geffen School of Medicine. Nearly 500 friends and colleagues attended his Los Angeles memorial, where Jeffrey Tambor and Penny Johnson Jerald opened the ceremony in character as Hank and Beverly.