The Larry Sanders Show
Channel 10
11.55pm, Wednesdays
Reviewed by Al McCall
It's not that I find gullibility objectionable in itself. A certain simple credulousness goes a long way. Without it, reality may be just too coarse for the constitution and, besides, how could we recognise a fool when we meet one?
Take Mike Moore, for instance, the proud innocent who anchored the ABC's mock current affairs show, Frontline. Without Mike's naive belief in himself and his avowed ethical principles, the program's satire would cease to work and we'd miss the point completely.
The use of innocence is a longstanding satirical technique. Voltaire used it. So too did Cervantes, Henry Fielding and Jaroslav Hasek. The conflict between genuine belief and social reality can lead toward a significant social critique. But, after a time, the formula can wear a bit thin.
On Wednesday nights on Channel 10, this does not happen. The network programmers don't know what to do with the Larry Sanders Show, so avail yourselves of the privilege while you can. This show-within-a-show has a history of being taken off the air as soon as it settles into a time slot.
I can understand 10's reluctance, because this parody of a late night talk show is savage. Over years of watching television and film, we have been encouraged to believe in characters with whom we can identify in some way. Even the bad are supposed to have their good side if we stay tuned long enough.
In Larry Sanders, there are no goodies. The stable of characters are (excuse the expression) a bunch of arseholes. This leaves many first time viewers non-plussed.
The knack of the guest star-laden Sanders is to switch between the talk show itself and the backstage back-biting of Larry (Garry Shandling), his warhorse producer (Rip Torn) and the unctuous co-host (Jeffrey Tambor) and assorted wives, agents and staff.
For these creatures of the show business food chain, what matters is personal survival. To stay on top, wits and cunning, rather than heart and soul, are needed.
The contrast between the social niceties of the on-air gabfest, and the unholy manoeuvres that create them is the dynamic that makes the Larry Sanders Show tick.
But if it were simply a send-up of a television formula, it would have only passing interest. Parody comes cheap, and the Larry Sanders Show is too thoughtful to let the industry off with a few snipes.
Our willingness to believe that such creatures as those of the Sanders zoo exist in TV-land perhaps confirms our suspicions about the TV business. There is enough situational farce to ensure that the show is very funny. For TV guide commentators, challenged by its sarcasm, the buzz word is "subtle".
Humour aside, Sanders comes with a further recommendation: it is thoroughly seditious. It not only turns on the industry that created it, but also subverts the major notions of industry advocates. All those standards of justice and truth that supposedly reward the good in this life and lead to many a happy ending are set aside for the sake of a brutal frontal attack on US liberalism.
Instead of niceness and apple pie, Sanders savages television's mawkish attachment to such ideas. The liberal sentenced to a pragmatism that always errs on the side of a superficial generosity will find no comfort here. The machinations and deviousness these characters are capable of prove that the business of television, like everywhere else under capitalism, breeds the offspring it deserves.