It’s Shandling’s Time : Reruns of His Whimsical Show Move to Fox Sunday, Movie on Tap

On one episode of “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show,” Rob Reiner, unable to find work as an actor, walked into Shandling’s living room and asked for a role on his offbeat sitcom. “This ‘Meathead’ thing from ‘All in the Family’ really has typecast me,” he said. Shandling replied, “I know what you mean. I’m sort of typecast as Garry Shandling.”

“Oh, that’s far worse,” Reiner deadpanned. “You’re digging yourself a hole you’ll never get out of.”

But riding a limousine to a Fox Broadcasting press conference, sporting a 2-day-old beard and a stretched-out gray sweater, Shandling isn’t worried one bit.

With his whimsical series on the Showtime pay-TV network drawing continuous raves from television critics, with Fox’s plans to air reruns of the cable show at 9 p.m. Sundays beginning this weekend, with his contract with NBC as occasional guest host of “The Tonight Show” still solid, and with “It’s Garry Shandling’s Movie” slated to go into production later this year, much of the known entertainment universe seems eager to jump into that “hole” with Shandling--even if he never steps out of his one and only character.

Most people familiar with Garry Shandling know him as Johnny Carson’s stand-in--a 38-year-old bachelor with big lips, big teeth, a whiny voice, a goofy laugh and a self-effacing wit who makes late-night audiences chuckle by fussing continuously over his blow-dried hair and telling tragicomic stories about an endless series of bad dates.

He’s the same guy on “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show.” But since the show is taped in a mockup of his own living room with his very own audience cheering him on, Shandling is a bit more casual, a bit more ill-mannered--disdaining his “Tonight Show” sports coat for jeans and high-top tennis shoes.

And in real life, cruising around in his Porsche and laughing about his mother’s “Graceland-like” shrine to him in her house in Tucson, Ariz., Shandling exudes all the self-conscious bewilderment and unconsious knack for falling into the kind of absurdly funny situations that plague the character Garry Shandling in his show. It is easy to see how a nice guy like him could end up on a date with a sexy but vacuous cable TV installer whose idea of a good time is singing the theme song to “Gilligan’s Island” at the top of her lungs.

“What you see on television is an exaggerated version of Garry,” says Brad Grey, Shandling’s longtime manager and the executive producer of the television show. “He’s a nice guy from Tucson, who works real hard and dates and hangs out with his friends. You see a real person up there, and people find that refreshing.”

“I never have to go into work in the morning and wonder what kind of mood Garry will be in,” says Alan Rafkin, the show’s director and a man who has worked on some of television’s most innovative sitcoms, including “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and “MASH.” “He’s always the same decent, open and honest person. He’s not an angel. He can whine until your teeth crack. But he’s always ready to work no matter what.”

Until now, only a small band of pay-cable viewers has been able to watch as Shandling, with a can-this-really-be-happening-to-me expression glued on his face, guides his audience through the bizarre situations that compose his television life.

In a recent episode, for example, Shandling visited the garish tomb of his deceased father to ask his advice about a particularly sticky problem. When his father answered him in a booming voice, inducing a surprised giggle from the studio audience, Shandling turned to them and said, “What, do you think I would talk to this thing if it didn’t talk back?”

“It’s Garry Shandling’s Show” strips away all of the usual show-business facade, pulling the camera back to reveal other cameras, the set walls and out-of-position boom operators. And by talking directly to his audience, Shandling, in a throwback to the days of George Burns and Jack Benny, breaks “the fourth wall,” one of episodic television’s most sacred taboos.

“ ‘Saturday Night Live’ was to the variety show what ‘It’s Garry Shandling’s Show’ is to the situation comedy,” says Alan Zweibel, one of the original writers on the NBC late-night series and the producer and Shandling’s writing partner on this show. “It’s constantly playing with the form and moving the boundaries.”

“It’s much more flying by the seat of the pants than anything I’ve ever done,” Rafkin says. “They’re making changes right up to the minute when the stage manager is counting down 5-4-3-2-1, and I say, ‘Where’s Garry? He’s supposed to be acting this scene’--and he’s off in the corner with Alan Zweibel rewriting it.”

The spontaneity that keeps Rafkin reeling in the director’s booth translates into a show that seems as if Shandling and his fellow actors are making it up as they go along.

In what he calls the best episode they did this past season, Shandling excitedly told the audience that his neighbors, the Schumakers, were going to give birth to their second child right there in his living room. The pregnant mother- and father-to-be arrived, and Shandling quickly became disgruntled when they told him that she could not just give birth on cue.

They all sat on the couch, waiting, while, fortunately, Shandling’s neighbors, Tom Petty and Susan Anton, just happened to drop by. Shandling persuaded them to perform and then sit on his couch to plug their latest projects a la an impromptu “Tonight Show.”

Jackie Schumaker finally went into labor and someone on stage turned to the audience and asked, “Is there a doctor in the house?” Shandling yelled off to the side, “Doc, quick, get in here,” and Doc Severinsen, toting his trumpet, rushed to the mother’s side. Then Shandling ordered the director to cut to the baby’s perspective, and the camera went to black, then to a bit of light coming through a small opening and then zoomed in to a hideously distorted closeup of Severinsen’s face.

Fox bought 44 episodes of this wacky show, hoping to rejuvenate its Sunday night lineup. So far, Shandling has completed 28 of a contracted 72 shows for Showtime, which has retained the right to air new Shandling episodes before they appear on Fox.

Shandling insists that even with the wider exposure on Fox’s lineup of commercial-TV stations (including KTTV Channel 11 in Los Angeles), the series will be exactly the same, except that on Fox, it will now contain commercials.

The commercial breaks should provide Shandling with another television toy with which to play. While Fox viewers will be stuck will traditional commercial fare, the Showtime audience might see Shandling ressurrect an old joke--in which he eats a glass of Ovaltine without milk and does a mock commercial with the chocolate powder sticking to his teeth.

No one is willing to predict how this series, which was rejected by the networks two years ago, will play to a mass audience on commercial television. Shandling will say only that he is “cautiously enthused” about being on Fox, the fledgling fourth network. “And I’ve never put those two words together in my life, except, I think, on prom night.”

As a kid growing up in Tucson, Shandling stayed up late watching Dick Shawn, Mort Sahl and Don Rickles on “The Tonight Show.” He says he was a funny boy, often getting in trouble for making people laugh in school. But even at 19, after his tastes had changed to Woody Allen and the Smothers Brothers, Shandling says he still wasn’t convinced that he could be really funny.

He set out studying engineering at the University of Arizona, but after two years of mediocre grades, he decided to pursue a career in comedy. He moved to Hollywood and sold scripts to “Sanford and Son” and “Welcome Back Kotter,” and occasionally, when he could muster the nerve, he’d do a standup routine on amateur night at the Comedy Store.

“And then one summer I went back to the Comedy Store and I had grown up a bit and I really had a strong set,” Shandling remembers. “And I thought, ‘Boy, this is what I want to do,’ because I enjoyed the freedom. Writing television you have to write to a certain form that has restrictions to it. But when you’re doing standup, you can do anything you want. I really responded to that.”

At 28, Shandling gave up his promising writing career and went on the road, performing in dive nightclubs across the country. In 1981, he achieved his one and only real career goal when he appeared on “The Tonight Show”--a thrill, he says, that he has never been able to duplicate.

“I walked out on stage that first time and I said, ‘This has been a really good day for me. I just got back from the bank,’ and then I held up one of those pens with a chain on it and said, ‘I got my free pen at the bank.’ And then I did some material about my dad and I could hear Johnny laughing And that was like a Twilight Zone kind of experience. I was sure Rod Serling would walk in at any minute.”

His career began to snowball after that performance, and it was from subsequent appearances on “The Tonight Show,” as Shandling began to steal more and more from his everyday life, that his current comic persona evolved.

Now, with the prospect of more people than ever looking in on the weird and wonderful moments of life in his television living room, Shandling says he will push his alter ego further. Already, he is planning to write an episode based on having had to put his dog to sleep--even though the TV Garry doesn’t own a dog.

And, as Fox’s newest and biggest star, maybe, just maybe, he will find it a bit easier to find a palatable date.

“Yeah,” Shandling says, “that’s exactly the kind of woman that I’m looking for--someone who is impressed that I’m on Fox.”